So says Peter Lehner,  executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council. This is welcome news. Like the other big environmental NGOs, NRDC has shied away from telling people what to eat (less red meat and dairy), what kinds of cars to drive (smaller ones), whether to fly (not too much)  or how many homes to own (one).

Peter Lehner

That may be about to change.

I spoke to Lehner last week after a three-day symposium on Climate, Mind and Behavior, sponsored by NRDC and the Garrison Institute, a nonprofit whose program on “transformational ecology” is led by Jonathan F.P. Rose, a New York real estate developer who also sits on NRDC’s board.  The event was designed explore ways to change behavior on a scale big enough to have a major impact on global GHG emissions.

The stellar group of participants included enviromentalists (Paul Hawken, Van Jones and Gus Speth), investors and business people (Mark Fulton and Bruce Kahn of Deutsche Bank, Jesse Fink of MissionPoint Capital Partners, Jack Jacometti of Shell) and academics (Dr. Benjamin Barber, John Gowdy of RPI, Jon Krosnick of Stanford and Anthony Leiserowitz of Yale).

The headline out of the event: Simple and inexpensive changes could reduce global warming emissions by one billion tons.

Put another way, the NRDC says changes in behavior could generate as many reductions as one of  the “climate stabilization wedges” made famous (at least among climate geeks) by Princeton professors Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow in this 2004 article in Science.

As Lehner puts it: “If all Americans acted together, by taking fairly modest steps, many of which are cost-saving or cost-neutral and will give them better lives, we could eliminate emissions, equivalent to those of the entire nation of Germany.”

“People often ask, if I change my behavior, what difference will it make?” Lehner goes on. “This analysis showed that it makes a lot of difference. That’s exciting.”

He hastens to add that individual actions cannot be a substitute for the policy changes needed to curb emissions and promote clean energy. Instead, he hopes, personal and individual actions will lead to activism.

“If you start biking to work,” he says, “you may become more active in your community, to make sure there are bike lanes. Policy is no longer abstract. It’s very real.”

Here are some of the recommendations from NRDC and the Garrison Institute. They may sound familiar, but bear with me–there’s a potential for new thinking here:

Fly once less per year: The average one-way commercial flight from London to Los Angeles produces more greenhouse gas emissions per passenger than the average British commuter produces yearly by car, train, and subway combined…While it would be unreasonable to expect those who fly only one or two times per year to give up their flight (that flight could well be their vacation), frequent flyers, and especially business travelers, could take advantage of alternative options like telecommuting to cut down on air travel.

Consume less red meat and dairy: All meats are not created equal: while the average pound of beef consumed in the United States is responsible for 20 pounds of emissions, a pound of chicken is responsible for less than two. Today’s average American consumes a prodigious quantity of red meat: the equivalent of one McDonald’s Angus Bacon and Cheese Burger per day. Replacing two days’ servings of red meat with poultry will reduce emissions by more than 70 MMtCO2e in 2020. Dairy cattle similarly produce vast quantities of greenhouse gas emissions. Dropping dairy two days per week in favor of plantbased foods is not only healthy—animal fats are closely correlated to obesity, diabetes and many forms of cancer—but will save more than 35 MMtCO2e in 2020.

Consume paper and plastics more responsibly: Buying recycled paper, stemming the flow of unwanted catalogs by two-thirds, and reducing printer paper consumption by one-third (easily achieved by printing doublesided) will save more than 50 MMtCO2e in 2020. Dropping bottled water consumption by 50 percent in that same timeframe will save another 8 MMtCO2e.

I’ve deliberately selected the recommendations that affect consumption. Others are less controversial and more familiar: Replace incandescent bulbs with CFLs, reduce motor vehicle idling, fix leaks and heat loss in your house, unplug appliances and turn the thermostat down a bit in winter and up a bit in summer (cardigan not required).

So what’s new here? Two things, I think.

The first is that the science of behavioral economics, along with new work being done around happiness studies and  climate change communications, offer fresh insights into how to get people to change. I’ve written about these developments before (see What’s for lunch? Behaviorial economics meets climate change and How to talk about climate change) and they are exciting.

One of the fundamental insights of behavioral economics is that people are not merely the rational, self-interested beings of Economics 101, but also emotional creatures, capable of altruism and influenced by the behavior of others. Much of our political discourse, including the debate about climate-change policies, focuses around the question of “what’s in it for me?” (This is why we hear so much about “green jobs.”) Some behaviorial economists argue that environmentalists would do well to  appeal to our better natures.

Here are a couple of brief excerpts from a draft paper [PDF, download] by RPI’s John Gowdy, who spoke at the event:

In contrast to the policy recommendations of most economists, relying on monetary incentives to tackle collective choice problems like global warming can actually have perverse effects. As many environmental philosophers have argued (Norton 2005; O’Neal 1993) giving people a shared responsibility and appealing directly to a sense of the common good is a much more effective way of gaining acceptance for environmental policies….

Successfully dealing with global climate may require cooperation on an unprecedented scale among people with radically different values and radically different needs. Formulating policies that tap into our social and genetic heritage of cooperation offers the best hope for success.

The other thing that’s new here is the potential for a conversation about consumption. For the most part, businesses won’t lead that conversation and until recently, environmental groups haven’t either. As Lehner put it: “We’ve talked about it passively on our website….What we are now exploring is talking about it a little more actively.”

This won’t be easy. It’s hard to talk about overconsumption without sounding like you are hectoring people. “It’s tricky because it’s personal,” Lehner says. “It’s hard to talk about somebody else’s life.”

But as we used to say in the 60s, the personal is political. It’s not simply a personal choice to drive an SUV when you don’t need one; it’s an anti-social act, as is idling your car when it’s part outside the dry cleaners or Starbucks. The food we eat, the cars we drive, the size of the houses we build and buy and other choices we make have global environmental consequences–particularly because Americans are, on a per capita basis, among the biggest polluters on the planet. So let’s get the conversation going.

According to Richard Branson’s new NGO, which is called the Carbon War Room, the global shipping fleet is the equivalent on the sixth most polluting country in the world:

Annual CO2e emissions currently exceed one billion tons and are projected to grow to 18% of all manmade CO2e emissions by 2050. Yet existing technology presents an opportunity for up to 75% gains in efficiency, with required investments repaid in just a few years.

Fixing shipping will take bold ideas — see the ship at left, which is equipped with a kite from a company called SkySails — and it will take simple ones, like slowing ships down a little, adopting the equivalent of a 55 mph limit on the open seas. (See this New York Times story, which is literally about a slow boat to China.) And it will require bringing shipping companies, customers, regulators and others to work together to attack the problem.

Opportunities like these interest the Carbon War Room, which says its focus is to harness the power of business to bring about market-driven solutions to climate change.

“We believe that climate change is the greatest challenge facing humankind,” says Jigar Shah, the CEO of the Carbon War Room. “And we need a war room-like effort to combat it.”

I spoke recently with Jigar at the NGO’s new offices in downtown Washington. We’d met a couple of years ago, when he was running SunEdison, a solar industry startup, backed by Goldman Sachs, that was among the first to sell solar energy as a service (buy electricity, not PV panels), a business model that appealed to big customers including Wal-Mart. Jigar, who is 35, left SunEdison at the end of 2008 and became the top exec of Carbon War Room last June.

Branson, who runs Virgin Group (airlines, music, telecom, green energy etc.), started Carbon War Room with Craig Cogut, the founder of private-equity firm Pegasus Capital, and Boudewijn Poelmann, the co-founder a chairman of the Dutch Postcode Lottery, a private lottery that raises money for good causes. (The Dutch lottery gave $1.3 million last year to the Rocky Mountain Institute.)

They say:

Our approach is to identify the barriers that are preventing market-based scale up of climate change solutions and thereby perpetuating the status quo. In addition to technology and policy gaps, these barriers include principal-agent problems, information gaps, and lack of common standards or metrics.

The Carbon War Room is also looking at building efficiency and seeking 10 cities to join in what Branson, speaking in Vancouver last month, called the Green Capital – Global Challenge. It all sounds a little amorphous and vague, but the group — which has only eight full-time staffers — is working with others to drive change.

Its shipping campaign, for example, includes representatives from Sustainable Shipping, an online news and information portal, and the well-respected NGO Oceana, as well as Jonathon Porritt, a prominent UK environmentalist and author. [CORRECTION: Carbon War Room contacted me after this ran to say they are no longer working with Oceana.] They’re also working with RightShip, an Australian firm the has long vetted ships for safety and now offers environmental ratings as well.

Jigar Shah

“In shipping, there’s been an information gap,” Shah explains. “Companies that hired shipping services had no idea which were efficient and which were not.”

That’s a problem because typically customers–big companies like Rio Tinto, Cargill or Wal-Mart that ship vast amounts of stuff around–pay fuel costs, according to Shah. So the owners of the ships have little incentive to invest their capital to improve efficiency.

Transparency is one way to stimulate change. Customers need to know which ships are most efficient. “We now have 160 companies that are using the data that we helped put together, and the impact has been huge,” Shah says.

Carbon War Room researchers have also identified more than 40 energy-saving technologies that they are sharing with the industry. Among them: low-friction paint that allows ships to glide through the water, more aerodynamic propeller designs and, of course, kites. SkySails, which is based in Germany, says a ship’s fuel costs can be cut by 10 to 35% by using wind power; its kites have been deployed by fishing trawlers as well as cargo ships.

“We’re working on technologies that currently save people money,” Shah says. “It’s far more straightforward and easier than trying to get governments to agree to binding targets in Copenhagen.”

This chart shows that global emissions from shipping (second from right) are slightly more than all emissions from Germany, slightly below those from Japan.

This product, a pair of self-adjusting eyeglasses, could change your life.

Or imagine that you are one of the 1.1 billion people on earth without access to clean, safe drinking water. Your child is in danger of contracting water-borne diseases, which kills 1.8 million a year. What would you give for this portable, water-filtration device, called LifeStraw?

Maybe you are one of the 1.6 billion people without regular access to electricity. Your children study at night using a kerosene lantern, but the fuel is expensive and dirty. A solar-powered lantern would be a dramatic improvement.

These breakthrough products, all of them invented in the last 5 o 10 years, are examples of what can be done when technology is designed for the poor. You’ve probably heard about One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), the low-cost connected computer developed by Nicholas Negroponte and the MIT Media Lab, but it’s just one of dozens of high-tech, high-impact products aimed at helping to spur global economic development. The trouble is, even though many of the products are low-cost–the LifeStraw, for example, sells for about $6.50–they aren’t available to many who need them.

That’s where a nonprofit called Kopernik comes in. Kopernik connects innovative technologies, poor communities and people who want to help.

A startup, Kopernik is the brainchild of Ewa Wojkowska and Toshihiro Nakamura, who’d worked for the last decade or so with the World Bank, the UN and local nonprofits in East Timor, Indonesia and Sierra Leone. Ewa, 34, who grew up in Australia, and Toshi, 35, who is from Japan, saw the innovation going on in the private sector, particularly in the U.S., but didn’t see as much fresh thinking among the old-line aid organizations.

“We became bothered by the lack of innovation and new ideas in solving development challenges,” Ewa told me, when we spoke by phone. “It was the same people and the same projects being tried from place to place.”

Ewa Wojkowska

Why weren’t products like getting to markets? Two reasons, Ewa and Toshi learned. The first was distribution. Inventors or producers “had connections in one country, and they found it difficult to go beyond that,” Ewa said. The other problem was cost. “Even though they were designed for the poor, the price was too high for the people who needed them,” she said.

The Kopernik platform is designed to connect the tech companies or nonprofits that make the products, groups in the developing world that need them and donors. NGOs in poor countries submit proposals that are vetted by Kopernik, then posted to the website so donors can choose which one to support.

So, for example, can help provide rural Ugandans with computer skills training using low-cost virtual desktop computers from a company called NComputing. Or they can ease the burden of carrying water for women in East Timor by supplying them with a Q-drum, or rollable water container.

If all goes well, Kopernik should be a boon to inventors like Piet Hendrikse, a South African who invented the Q-drum, and Josh Silver, an Oxford professor, atomic physicist and director of the Centre for Vision in the Developing World, who developed the first fluid-filled adjustable eyeglasses. (Here’s a blogpost from Gizmodo explaining how they work.)

The idea of connecting people in rich countries with those in need in the global south comes from Kiva, a microfinance site which has facilitated more than $124 million in small loans since its beginnings in 2005, and Global Giving, which connects donors to causes, countries and NGOs that they care about. (Global Giving was started by World Bank alums Mari Kuraishi and Dennis Whittle, who are acquaintainces of mine; it has given away about $27 million since 2002 and is well worth a look.)

“We’re huge fans of Kiva and Global Giving,” says Kopernik’s Ewa Wojkowska. “We’ve learned a lot from them.”

Kopernik will fund itself by charging donors and technology providers a 5% commission, as explained here. Ewa and Toshi live in New York, and they  expect to have an office in Indonesia as well. The startup is still very new–it launched February 19, the date on which Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was born in 1473. (My birthday, too, so I couldn’t resist writing about Kopernik!)

“Copernicus changed the way that people see the world around them,” Ewa said. “In our own way, we at Kopernik (Copernicus’ Polish name) want to help change the way people think about development and see the world today.”

Here’s a video, with bouncy music, showing Eva distributing the self-adjusting glasses to a clinic in Manado, Indonesia.

No form of energy–not solar, wind, hydropower, obviously not coal or oil–comes without environmental tradeoffs.

One promising new energy source–a vast supplies of natural gas, trapped in shale deep beneath the earth’s surface–is getting renewed scrutiny these days, and for good reason.

While natural gas is often called a “bridge” to a clean energy future, critics are bombing the bridge with a frack attack, says energy policy analyst Kevin Book of Clearview Energy Partners.

Book was referring to the drumbeat of questions being raised by environmentalists, community activists, reporters and  members of Congress about  hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a process during which water, chemicals and sand are pumped underground at  high pressure to cause tiny fissures in rock and force natural gas to the surface.

In the weeks ahead, new pressures will come from activist shareholders of a dozen energy companies. They’ve filed shareholder resolutions asking the companies to take a hard look at fracking and its risk, and they will raise the issue at annual shareholder meetings.

“Investors support natural gas drilling, but we want to make sure that it’s done right,” said Richard Liroff, executive director of the Investor Environmental Health Network. a group of investors and NGOs who focus on the financial and public health risks associated with corporate use of toxic chemicals. “What we are pushing companies to do is to implement the best management practices.”

In a news release announcing their campaign, the investors say:

Investors and investor advisors including As You Sow, Green Century Capital Management, Miller/Howard Investments, Catholic Healthcare West, First Affirmative Financial Network, the Mercy Investment Program, the New York State Common Retirement Fund, the Shareholder Association for Research & Education, Pax World Management, the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia, the Sustainability Group, and Trillium Asset Management have begun to engage approximately 20 companies, and have filed shareholder resolutions with 12 companies including Cabot Oil & Gas Corporation (COG), Chesapeake Energy (CHK), ExxonMobil (XOM), Hess Corporation (HES), EOG Resources (EOG), and Range Resources (RRC) over these risks.

What’s the problem with fracking? The process, which uses millions of gallons of water and unknown chemicals,  has been linked to a range of health and environmental problems, including contaminated drinking water in Pennsylvania,  a massive fish kill in a creek along the border between Pennsylvania and West Virginia and a chemical spill that killed cows in Shreveport, Louisiana, as the Wall Street Journal has reported.

If you want to know more, let me recommend an excellent series of prize-winning stories published by the investigative news site, Pro Publica, and written by Abrahm Lustgarten, a former colleague of mine at FORTUNE. Abrahm has spent more than a year investigating hydraulic fracturing. While the industry insists that gas drilling is sage, he  writes that:

…the issues are far less settled than the industry contends, and that hidden environmental costs could cut deeply into the anticipated benefits.

For example, it remains unclear how far the tiny fissures that radiate through the bedrock from hydraulic fracturing might reach, or whether they can connect underground passageways or open cracks into groundwater aquifers that could allow the chemical solution to escape into drinking water. It is not certain that the chemicals – some, such as benzene, that are known to cause cancer – are adequately contained by either the well structure beneath the earth or by the people, pipelines and trucks that handle it on the surface. And it is unclear how the voluminous waste the process creates can be disposed of safely .

“This is a field where there is almost no research,” said Geoffrey Thyne, a former professor at the Colorado School of Mines and an environmental engineering consultant for local government officials in Colorado. “It is very much an emerging problem.”

The natural gas industry’s response to the allegations hasn’t helped its cause. EOG Resources and Cabot Oil & Gas both went to the SEC, asking that the shareholder resolutions be taken off the ballot. That failed. Chesapeake Energy has also challenged the resolution.

Worse, companies refuse to disclose the chemicals used in the fracking process, calling them trade secrets. The 2005 energy bill, spearheaded by then-Vice President Dick Cheney, exempted natural gas drilling from disclosure requirements of  federal clean water laws. Critics call that the “Halliburton exception” because Halliburton, the company where Cheney was once CEO, helped pioneer fracking.

Last month, Congressman Henry Waxman asked eight oil and gas companies that use fracking to provide information about the chemicals they use.

Rich Liroff

The IEHN’s Rich Liroff says owners of the companies can’t get the information they need to assess risk:

This is a sector-wide problem. There is virtually no meaningful disclosure from any of the companies about what safeguards they are employing and what efforts they are making to implement best management practices.

If you are an investor who wants to invest in the natural gas sector, and figure out what the risks are and the rewards are for any individual company, you just don’t have enough information to make an informed judgment.

Larissa Ruoff, director of shareholder advocacy at Green Century Funds and a leader of the investor coalition, is also calling for more transparency and engagement from the companies.

An industry website, Energy in Depth, says the concerns of critics are overblown. It notes that fracking is now responsible for about 30% of the U.S.’s domestic oil and natural gase, and that 60 to 80% of wells drilled in the U.S. in the next decade will require fracturing. As for the safety issues, the industry says:

Hydraulic fracturing is a safe, well-regulated, environmentally sound practice that has been employed over one million times without a single incidence of drinking water contamination.

If that’s so, why fight the critics? Why not engage with them?

As Gil Friend, the CEO of a consulting firm called Natural Logic, writes in his 2009 book, The Truth About Green Business:

Your business can wait to be dragged, kicking and screaming…or it can lead the way…. If you’re constantly reacting, you risk losing market share to innovators, while you’re spending more time and resources adjusting. Being reactive is no way to run a successful business.

Smart companies will be open about their practices and get ahead of this controversy before it gets out of control–unless they really do have something to hide.

Lake Kivu

As natural disasters go, the limnic eruption — an explosion of gas from beneath a lake  — of Lake Nyos in Cameroon in 1986 ranks among the most horrifying and bizarre:  About 1,700 people and 3,500 livestock were suffocated when a large cloud of CO2 descended silently on their villages.

Lake Kivu, one of Africa’s great lakes, which lies on the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, poses a similar danger because vast amounts of methane gas and CO2 are buried in its depths. At the same time, rural Rwanda desperately needs more electricity–only about 6 percent of the nation’s 9.7 million people are connected to the electricity grid, according to the government.

To Contour Global, a private company that specializes in power-generation projects in the global south, this is a business opportunity. The company has embarked on an ambitious $325 million plan to extract the methane gas from the lake to provide about 100 megawatts of gas-fired electricity to Rwanda.

To put that in context, total generating capacity in Rwanda is now just 69 megawatts — about 10% of the capacity of a single coal-fired power plant in the U.S.

Recently, I spoke will Bill Fox, senior vice president of Contour Global, who is overseeing the Lake Kivu project. The company, he told me, was founded in 2005 by Joe Brandt, a former executive with the global power generation company AES, and funded by Reservoir Capital, a $4 billion investment fund. Contour Global and Reservoir Capital are based in New York.

Fox, who is 62, spent most of his career in the U.S. before joining Contour Global two years ago. Since then, he has managed a hydroelectric project in Brazil and made four trips to Lake Kivu.

“The country, under President Kagame, has a very ambitious goal to increase the electrification rate,” Fox told me. “They’re going about it in a major way, building transmission and generation.”

The technology behind the Lake Kivu project is a bit of a mystery to me but, as Fox explained it, Contour Global will build a gas extraction facility that will be mounted on a big barge. It will then siphon gases to the surface from a depth of about 350 meters.

Bill Fox

The barge will process the liquid, separate out methane gas (CH4), which is the principal component of natural gas, and return the CO2 safely to the lake. The gas will then be sent by pipeline to a power plant in lakeside town of Kibuye. Methane emitted from coal mines and landfills is often burned to make electricity.

In fact, as Fox explained, the technology behind the Lake Kivu power plan isn’t that complex. What’s harder is getting the project built in landlocked nation with limited infrastructure. “We’re 1900 kilometers from the closest seaport. The logistics of the job are going to be more challenging than the project itself,” he said.

Then again, getting the job done could literally be a matter of life and death. “In the next 200 years, if nothing is done, the lake could erupt,” Fox said.

Just as crucial are the potential economic benefits. I’ve followed the Rwanda story since visiting the country in 2005 with Rick Warren, the evangelical minister, and seeing first-hand the aftermath of the genocide there. In recent years, U.S. corporations, including Starbucks, Costco and Google, have taken an special interest in the country known as the Land of a Thousand Hills (see Why CEOs Love Rwanda). Rwanda’s business-friendly president, Paul Kagame, even spoke at a Starbucks annual meeting. A can-do spirit animates their efforts, As Rob Glaser, the tech entrepreneur, once told me: “If you make a Rwanda a better place, you haven’t solved all the world’s problems but you have demonstrated that the problems can be solved.”

But there are troubling reports coming out of Rwanda, too. The Kagame administration has repressed Rwandan journalists, advocacy groups and opposition leaders, according to Amnesty International. Just this month, Human Rights Watch said that the regime’s opponents face increasing threats, attacks, and harassment in advance of Rwanda’s August 2010 presidential election. Some of this reflects the lingering effects of the 1994 genocide which killed an estimated 800,000 people in about 100 days.

In that context, the Contour Global project is particularly important because economic growth and democracy often go hand-in-hand.The relationship between economic growth and democracy isn’t simple but there’s considerable evidence that “countries are likely to become democratic if economic growth succeeds in raising their average incomes to high enough levels,” according to this analysis by economist Gary Becker.

And, of course,a growing economy needs access to electricity. Google, for example, has a partnership with Rwanda’s schools and ministries that will have more if Internet access becomes widespread. As I write this blogpost on my laptop in a coffee shop with free wi-fi in Bethesda, Md., it’s easy to forget that one-quarter of the world’s population lacks access to electricity.

Making an on-off switch part of their lives is transformative. That’s why Bill Fox, who has been in the power business for 30 years, is so jazzed about his work.

“This is a great opportunity for us as Contour Global,” Fox said. “Obviously, we’re getting paid but it’s almost like a mission to be benefiting countries like Rwanda.”

“Houston’s not a natural market for electric cars,” Crane admitted, when we met the other day. “But electric cars are good for our business in all kinds of ways,” he added. So NRG and Reliant is working with officials Houston, America’s 4th largest city, to persuade Nissan to make Houston one of the leading launch markets for the Nissan Leaf, the all electric vehicle that the Japanese automaker plans to start selling later this year.

Houston's skyline at night

“We are the Petro Metro, but we are also a car city,” said Houston’s newly-elected mayor, Annise Parker, at an event earlier this month to welcome Nissan to the city. Certainly there’s a sizable market awaiting Nissan in the city. Houston is home to 4.5 million vehicles that travel 86 million miles a day, according to Reuters.

The problem for Houston–and for most other cities that want to welcome electric cars–is that it lacks an infrastructure of charging stations where electric car owners can fill up their cars with, er, electricity. This winter, Nissan took the Leaf on a three-month, 24-city tour designed to spark excitement about the car, a five-passenger car that the company says will travel about 100 miles on a single charge.

But because the Leaf will be produced in limited numbers, at least at first, the tour was also a way for Nissan to solicit partners, mostly cities and utility companies, that will assume the costs of building charging stations that will allow electric car drivers to overcome what is known as “range anxiety”–the feeling that they might run out of electricity without a charging station nearby.

Nissan has persuaded a number of cities to build charging stations, including those that are part of the EV Project, which the company says is the world’s largest EV infrastructure deployment. Nissan says:

The EV Project, funded by a $98 million grant from the Department of Energy and led by EV infrastructure provider eTec, a division of Ecotality, will provide an unprecedented number (6,510) of public charging stations across the 5 participating markets and will provide home charging stations for up to 4700 Nissan Leafs sold in those markets. The public stations will include both Level 2 (240V) and Level 3 DC fast chargers.  The EV Project markets are Seattle, Oregon, Tennessee (Knoxville, Nashville and Chattanooga), Phoenix/Tucson, Ariz., and San Diego.

You’ll note that Houston isn’t on that list. That’s where Crane, NRG and Reliant come in. Last fall, Reliant and Nissan said they’d work together to build a network of charging stations. Reliant also launched an EV pilot project with 10 city-owned Toyota Prius cars that have been converted to plug-in hybrids. “Those are just a taste of what’s ahead,” Crane told me.

Crane’s one of the liveliest and most likable energy executives around. The Princeton- and Harvard-educated CEO is smart, straightforward and funny. As CEO of NRG, he leads an independent power producer (meaning that its electricity is usually sold to consumer-facing utilities, not directly to homeowners or businesses) that is investing in an array of low-carbon energy sources–nuclear power, utility-scale solar thermal plants and solar photovoltaic arrays. NRG is exploring offshore wind energy and so-called clean coal, too.

For electric power companies like NRG, which have seen demand for electricity slip during the recession, the electric car represents a new business opportunity, at least in theory. As  Kevin Book, managing director of research at ClearView Energy Partners LLC, told Reuters: “What a salvation the electric car revolution would be for generators that are well below their capacity margins and trying to figure out how to make money.”

While Houston may lack the green culture of, say, Portland, Oregon, the city wants to welcome electric cars for a couple of reasons, Crane explained.

First, west Texas has an abundance of cheap wind energy (See my blogpost, Electricity That’s Cheaper Than Free) that is available overnight and during periods of low demand to recharge electric cars at a low cost.

Second, Houston has a serious smog problem. The EPA is proposing tougher limits on ozone pollution, which contributes to smog, and those limits “will force Houston to make deeper emissions cuts just as the former smog capital met the previous standard for the first time,” according to The Houston Chronicle. Cities that fail to comply with EPA air pollution rules run the risk of losing federal highway funds.

No wonder Houston’s civic and business establishment are eager to welcome the Leaf, which markets itself a Zero Emission Car, apparently choosing not to count the emissions created when coal or natural gas is burned to make electricity.

Nissan Leaf

All this, in the end, will be driven by the compelling economics of electric cars. (See Electric Cars: All Systems Go.) In the U.S., assuming $3 a gallon gas, fuel costs for a mid-sized car with an internal combustion engine are about 12 to 14 cents a mile. For an electric car, with its more efficient engine, electricity costs are 2 to 4 cents a mile. That doesn’t include the substantial cost of amortizing the battery but, even so, as Crane put it: “There’s a big delta in there that you can use to pay for other services.”

He envisions Reliant helping Nissan to sell the Leaf by providing a Level 2 (medium-fast) charging station for the home and then selling the new car owner a contract to buy as many miles as desired. “Think of the electric car as a cellphone,” Crane says, where the utility is the equivalent of A&T or T-Mobile, selling access to a network and minutes instead of miles. Crane can get even more excited talking about V2G, or a network of electric vehicles tied to a smart grid, where owners could buy cheap, clean, wind-powered electricity at night and sell it back to the grid during the day when demand peaks.

A futuristic vision? Maybe. Then again, Crane gets around his home town of Princeton, N.J., in a Tesla that he’s been driving for seven months. It’s too small to ferry his kids to their hockey games but otherwise it’s been trouble free, it’s got a range of more than 200 miles, and it charges overnight.

“Your garage,” he says, “is the service station of the future.”

I’m pleased that David Crane will be joining us again in April at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference on business and the environment, where he’s talk about electric cars, NRG’s nuclear ambitions and the Washington scene.

Decentralized political power, a.k.a. democracy. Decentralized economic power, a.k.a. markets. Decentralized computing power, a.k.a. the Internet. Decentralized media power, a.k.a. blogs. Decentralized power, literally, a.k.a., rooftop solar. You get the idea.

That’s why I’m interested a start-up company called Genius Rocket, headquartered near my home in Bethesda, Md. (”Headquartered” is a stretch: Genius Rocket has just five full-time employees.) But this little company is built on a big idea: That advertising and marketing can be crowdsourced. Which is a fancy way of saying that two or 200 or 2,000 heads are better than one.

In practice, this means that entrepreneurs, startups, small companies, nonprofits and others who can’t afford high-priced Madison Avenue agencies  can let Genius Rocket become their virtual ad agency and outsource their creative work to a global crowd–13,956 minds, at last count.

Customers include nonprofits like Ashoka, which promotes social enterpreneurs,  Riverkeeper, the clean-water advocacy group led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Kopernik, a new and very cool bottom-of-the-pyramid NGO, about which more another day; small companies like Al Fresco All Natural, which commissioned a video for its chicken sausage, and True Lemon;  and big brands like Sony Bravia and PepsiCo.

Recently, I had lunch with Mark Walsh, the CEO of Genius Rocket. (Small world: I wrote short piece about Vertical Net, Mark’s b-to-b web company, in 1997 for FORTUNE, headlined The Web’s Trashiest Site: SolidWaste.Com!) Mark, who is 55, a lively guy who has had an action-packed business career, working at HBO during the early days of cable, at AOL during the early days of the web, then at Vertical Net where he made a pile of money and more recently as the volunteer Internet guru for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign and the founding CEO of Air America. “I’ve always been a new business junkie,” he told me.

Advertising is in Mark’s DNA. His dad ran an agency in Baltimore and his mother provided the voice for one of the best-known commercial slogans of the 1960s: “More Park Sausages Mom! Please…” Now, by eliminating the costly infrastructure of an advertising agency, and by drawing upon the creativity of many, Genius Rocket can create Internet videos, TV and print ads, logos and slogans at a fraction of the cost that clients would pay at a big  ad shop.

To pick one example, Many Wheels was a start-up technology company, backed by a National Science Foundation grant,, aimed at improving the process of shipping and transporting cars. The company solicited ideas from Genius Rocket, received more than 300 submissions and eventually selected this logo:

Customers can request a new logo from Genius Rocket for a minimum of $500, or more if they want to encourage more submissions.

Below are a couple of videos created by the Genius Rocket crowd. The first, a local TV ad for the National Association of Federal Credit Unions, is simple but it gets the message across.

This one, for a company called Wicked Lasers, is a bit more outrageous.

Each cost less than $5,000, and Walsh says he is not just selling on the basis of price. These videos, he argues, are more effective than agency product because they come across as home-made and authentic and therefore are more likely to touch younger audiences who are cynical about slick and over-produced ads.

Genius Rocket has plenty of competition. CrowdSpring says it has 52,000 graphic designers and writers “standing by” to provide services for small business. 99Designs specializes in graphics and says its community is 168,000 strong. Elance and Craigslist, of course, are robust online marketplaces for all kinds of freelance work. Hoping to stand out from the crowd, Walsh recently launched Genius Rocket Select, which he calls “curated crowdsourcing;” customers will pay more, up to $50,000, but get more hand-holding along the way.

Businesses like Genius Rocket will do well so long as we are in a down economy. “A lot of ex-advertising agency workers are coming to us because the agency business is shrinking,” Walsh said. The problem, of course, is that the contest model produces many more losers than winners. The most creative people, it seems to me, will prefer to take a salaried job at an ad agency where the company itself assumes the risk and cost or bidding for work that it may or may not win.

Walsh, though, says that kind of job security will be harder and harder to find as the agencies are disintermediated by the likes of Genius Rocket.

“It’s free-agent nation, man,” he says.

Over the last few years. awareness about carbon emissions from U.S. buildings has increase. Buildings are by far the biggest greenhouse gas polluters. Americans consumed about 3.7 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2009, about 72% from buildings. About half came from coal-fired power plants. This accounted for approximately 2.5 billion metric tons of CO2 emission, which is equivalent to the emissions from 400 million cars–many more than the roughly 250 million cars on U.S. roads.

In the book Addicted to Energy,  Elton Sherwin writes:

Over 68% of the energy consumed in power plants is lost. If we could wave a magic wand and eliminate all our lost energy, America would burn no coal and import almost no oil.

While majority of the energy lost is in generation, transmission and distribution, there is still a lot of energy lost as waste heat Waste heat is a result of inefficiencies in our usage of electricity. I have a broad definition of vampire energy, which is the energy used by any device when the intended audience/purpose of the device is not being served.

Unfortunately, there is not much awareness about waste heat and vampire energy.

My company, SpeakEnergy, created www.usefulorwaste.com to increase awareness of energy usage. Users can upload pictures that show energy being used right or energy being wasted and get others to rate these pictures as “Useful” or “Waste”. Here are some examples:

Demo TVs at big electronics retailers: Electronics retailers have a wall of demo TVs that are on all day. It does not matter if anyone is watching; they are part of the ambiance. I think the energy used by these demo TVs when no customer is looking at them is vampire energy as it does not serve its purpose, which is to help customers compare TVs. Big electronics retailers should find ways to turn on TVs only as needed. Users have rated the energy used by these TVs (shown above) as waste.

Lights in vacant office space: This recession has been tough on commercial real estate, leaving office space empty. Even though the buildings are unoccupied some owners have lights on 24 x 7. This serves no purpose. There is about 49 million sq. ft. of vacant office space in the Bay Area alone. Assuming that 20% of this space has lights on 24 x 7, that would use  about 70% of a coal fired power plant’s capacity. The CO2 emissions from these vacant office space would be equivalent to those made by 8000 cars, and this is just in Northern CA region. Not surprisingly, users have rated the 24×7 lights in vacant office buildings as “Waste.”

Bulbs vs. Sunlight I do not think we have invented a bulb yet that can compete against sunlight, but nevertheless we try. Many times in the last few months, I’ve seen ample sunlight in a room but occupants switch on the light bulbs anyway. They’re used to the light bulbs and hence they adhere to their habits. We’d  save energy and reduce CO2 emissions if we could get our eyes accustomed to working in sunlight. The picture below shows that street lights are on even though there is enough sunlight, another “Waste”.

After hours energy usage: A lot of energy is wasted after hours, when retailers, car dealers, grocery chains and other stores leave their lights on throughout the night. Some support this as a theft deterrent and effort to makes a neighborhood safe. But have owners or tenants heard about motion detectors? Stores could install them so that lights would go on when motion is detected. This will make the stores safe while cutting down their energy usage. Here’s a picture of a car dealership, where lights and TV have been left on during off hours. Surely a waste of energy.

Overall, we all waste a lot of energy without realizing it. If all goes well, our site will increase awareness amongst energy users and help lead to targeted campaigns against waste. You’ve heard the saying: A picture is worth 1,000 words. Maybe a few pictures can save a few thousand megawatts.

The $405-billion a year retailer has worked hard since 2005 to save energy, reduce waste and sell more sustainable products.

But it resisted pressures to reduce or hold steady its own greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, its carbon emissions have grown, as the middle graphic below shows. (There’s a cleaner version in WMT’s responsibility report, here.) When it comes to global warming, Walmart would appear to be doing more harm now than it was three or five years ago.

Today, Walmart made its first major commitment to reduce greenhouse gases–although, in typical WMT fashion, rather than set a tough goal that might affect its own growth curve, the company plans to turn up the pressure on its thousands of suppliers to reduce their emissions.

Here’s how a press release from Walmart and its lead environmental partner, Environmental Defense Fund, explained it:

Walmart today announced a goal to eliminate 20 million metric tons of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from its global supply chain by the end of 2015. This represents one and a half times the company’s estimated global carbon footprint growth over the next five years and is the equivalent of taking more than 3.8 million cars off the road for a year.

The footprint of Walmart’s global supply chain is many times larger than its operational footprint and represents a more impactful opportunity to reduce emissions.

You can think of this as the biggest carbon offset in global history, and I’m being only partly facetious when I say that.

Walmart wants to grow–the company is expanding in the U.S., and elsewhere in the world–and it will likely grow its own carbon footprint, directly and indirectly, as it sells more stuff and builds new stores, most in suburbs and rural areas, surrounding by acres of parking.  But the companies that supply WMT–that is, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Clorox, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Kraft, General Mills, Sony, Apple, HP, Dell and hundreds more, all of whom must be wondering about their carbon emissions right now–will be asked to make things more efficiently, use less energy, buy more recycled content and the like.

As Leslie Dach, a top Wal-Mart executive, put: “It is really a Wal-Mart approach to solving a problem…The size and scale of this company can be put to use to make a real difference in the world.”

That’s no doubt a good thing. Better, as one of my sources told me, to improve practices at 10,000 factories around the world than simply to make WMT’s operations more efficient.  “Sensational” was how Fred Krupp, the president of Environmental Defense Fund, described it, during a lovefest with Walmart CEO Mike Duke, which was webcast on Treehugger, of all places.

Duke praised EDF, saying: “Our NGO partners have pushed us and been patient with us.”

Krupp returned the favor. EDF has planted two staffers in Bentonville, Arkansas, to work closely with WMT, and he said: “I don’t think there’s any better money we are spending anywhere.”

Specifics about how the carbon reduction effort would work were few, understandably so since it is new.  “This is uncharted waters,” said Elizabeth Sturcken of EDF. (Here is her excellent analysis, with some detail on initiatives in packaging and around dairy products.) Right now, there’s little data available to measure the carbon impacts of the products that Wal-Mart sells, particularly if you want to include how they are made, shipped, used and thrown away, as WMT does.

Walmart said it would start with the products that have the most “embedded carbon” and seek GHG reductions thatn are “economically viable.” The company has already had success getting suppliers to use smaller packages, from concentrated detergents to lighter-weight DVD cases.

Walmart itself, though, wants to get bigger. Duke was straightforward about this. “We are a growth company,” he said. “We want to add square footage. That’s the reality of our business.”

Critics are unsatisfied. Here’s reaction from Stacy Mitchell, a senior researcher with the New Rules Project, a program of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance:

By focusing on suppliers, Wal-Mart continues to deflect attention from the enormous greenhouse gas implications of its own business model. Wal-Mart is rapidly expanding in China, Mexico, and other countries, where it is destroying neighborhood businesses and replacing them with an auto-oriented form of big-box shopping that is highly polluting. Under Wal-Mart, local and regional systems of economic production and distribution are giving way to global supply chains, which almost invariably means longer distances and greater fuel consumption.

She’s got a point, but the story is more complicated, for a couple of reasons. (Warning: geeky analysis ahead.) First, look at the graphic on the far right, above. Walmart is reducing its GHG emissions per unit of sales, meaning that it’s more efficient. So, if its competitors are not doing as well in terms of efficiency, and if it takes market share away, then it’s possible that WMT can sell more stuff and the planet will be better off. For example, if Walmart sells lots of Fair Trade coffee, and the locally-owned convenience store around the corner sells less conventional coffee, that’s a good thing. Local isn’t necessarily better.

Second, and paradoxically, Walmart is actually becoming more local. For example, Walmart has made a concerted effort to buy more from local farmers. Corby Kummer has a terrific article about this in the current Atlantic, in which he asks: Will Walmart and not Whole Foods save the Small Farm and Make America Healthy? The company, he reports, “wants to revive local economies and communities that lost out when agriculture became centralized in large states.” Best quote in the story is from Michelle Harvey of EDF who says: “It’s getting harder and harder to hate Walmart.”

True enough. Nevertheless, in my ideal world, Walmart would set a cap on its own emissions, sell used goods as well as new, nudge people to buy vegetables instead of meat, and share profits with its workers.  In today’s world, Walmart will try to grow (profits) and shrink (pollution) at the same time. That’s about all we can ask of a big company until we, collectively, can find a way to decouple economic growth from environmental harm. That’s a job too big even for Walmart.

Despite fierce opposition to so-called Frankenfoods in Europe, which in turn has discouraged farmers in Africa from planting genetically-modified seeds, biotech acreage under cultivation around the world grew to 134 million hectares last year, up 7% over 2008.

Roughly 14 million farmers planted biotech crops, up from about 13.3 million a year ago, and nearly 90% were small, resource-poor farmers from developing countries, according to a pro-biotech nonprofit group called the International Service for the Acquisition of Agro-Biotech Applications or ISAAA.

Growth is especially robust in poor countries, as the chart below shows.

What this says is that farmers, when given a choice between biotech and conventional crops, are opting for biotech. And after listening to a presentation the other day from Clive James, the chairman and founder of ISAAA, it’s clear to me that the growth is going to continue.

In a landmark decision last fall, China issued biosafety certificates for biotech insect-resistant rice and phytase corn. Phytase is an additive, widely used in animal feed, that increases phosphorus absorption and helps animals grow faster. Origin Agritech (NASDAQ: SEED), a Beijing-based company that developed the phytase corn, says it will save farmers money and reduce phosphate pollution caused by animal waste and excessive fertiliser use. While commercial use of these biotech crops is several years away, these three facts–rice is the world’s most important food crop, corn is the most important feed crop and China is the biggest market–leave little doubt biotech crop acreage will continue to grow.

Few topics in the world of business and sustainability are more controversial than biotech foods. I’m reluctant to wade into the debate for a couple of reasons. First, I’m not an expert on farming nor on the human health issues raised by biotech’s critics. Second, I’m conducting a series of interviews about sustainable agriculture for Monsanto’s website, Produce More Conserve More, for which I’m being paid. I agreed to do so only after talking about biotech with people I respect–among them, Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund, Glenn Prickett of The Nature Conservancy and Stewart Brand–all of whom say that they think biotech foods are essential if we are going to feed the world’s growing population while limiting the environmental footprint of farming. In his book, Whole Earth Discipline, Stewart wrote:

I daresay the environmental movement has done more harm with its opposition to genetic engineering than with any other thing we’ve been wrong about. We’ve starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool.

Strong words, no? In response, GM Watch, an anti-biotech website, called Stewart an “ageing hippie technophile” who “has never been short on hubris.” That’s name-calling, not argument. Others whose work I respect, including Andrew Kimbrell and Bill Freese of the Center for Food Safety, argue that genetically-engineered foods should not be commercialized until “they have been thoroughly tested and found safe for human health and the environment.” Of course, it’s not easy to prove that something is safe. The Center for Food Safety also wants foods containing biotech ingredients to be labeled. Still another critic of biotech who has my ear is my  daughter Sarah, who funds grassroots organizations in Africa as a senior program officer for the American Jewish World Service. Maybe I’ll invite her to do a guest post.

This posting isn’t about the controversy. It’s about what’s happening on the ground, literally. Farmers are voting for biotech, and they are doing so with their livelihoods at stake. This suggests that, at the very least, biotech crops deliver meaningful benefits to farmers–they enable them to save money, or work less, or improve their productivity.

The U.S. remains by far the No. 1 producer of biotech crops, followed by Brazil and Argentina, with every other country lagging well behind. (The top 15 countries are listed below. Yes, I know the chart is hard to read but you can also find the list in this press release.) China was one of 16 developing countries that grew biotech crops in 2009, according to ISAAA, and nearly half the biotech acreage is in the developing world.

“This puts to rest the idea that biotech crops can only benefits larger farms in developed countries,” James said during a conference call with reporters.

South Africa and Burkina Faso, where cotton is a major export, led African countries in adoption of biotech. Burkina Fason’s biotech cotton now accounts for 29% of the country’s cotton-growing land. Of course, there’s less controversy surrounding biotech cotton since it is a fiber and not a food crop. Japan, meanwhile, is growing biotech roses and carnations. Who knew?

Now, without knowing the context in which farmers are turning to biotech, it would be a mistake to read too much into this data. Individual farmers are influenced by government policy, the inducements of NGOs (like the pro-biotech Gates Foundation) and the information they have (or don’t have) available.

I’m looking forward to learning more about biotech agriculture.  It’s possible that we may regret this global-scale experiment that we embarked upon less than 15 years ago. But the market seems to be telling us that biotech crops are a good idea. Then again, we’ve all learned lately that markets are not infallible.