The carbon negative economy

March 28, 2012

Robert C. Brown of Iowa State

“Let’s not simply reduce the CO2 emissions going up into the atmosphere. Let’s draw them down.”

So says Robert Brown, a professor of engineering at Iowa State University and a leader of the university’s Initiative for a Carbon Negative Economy and its Bioeconomy Institute. Those are interdisciplinary campus efforts to develop ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by growing plants or algae, making them into fuels and burying their carbon residues in soil–and make money doing it.

The notion that we can generate wealth and remove CO2 from the air is obviously appealing. As atmospheric concentrations of CO2 rise and climate risks grow, so does the need for carbon-negative technologies that pull CO2 from the air, as plants do, and then store it  underground or deep in the ocean.

But is this practical, or a pipe dream? That’s what Brown and his colleagues at Iowa State and its Bioeconomy Institute want to find out, as they explained this week at a two-day workshop on  biochar  — that’s the term used for the charcoal created when biomass is decomposed at high heat, in a process called pyrolysis. The workshop was part of the Carbon War Room‘s Creating Climate Wealth Summit in Washington, D.C..

The Carbon War Room, as you may know, is a nonprofit created by Richard Branson of Virgin fame to unlock gigaton-scale, market-driven solutions to climate change. Its new president will be Jose Maria Figueres, the former president of Costa Rica. The group is also tackling projects around energy efficiency, renewable jet fuel, low-carbon ocean shipping and sustainable livestock.

Biochar has been around for a long time, but it’s getting new attention from government and business. The Iowa State researchers last fall were awarded a $25 million research grant  from USDA to see if they can find ways to use  marginal farmlands to grow perennial grasses and turn them into biofuels and biochar. Local firms like ADM, the agribusiness giant, have expressed support. [click to continue…]

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Shattered Sky: How Republicans saved the ozone layer

March 26, 2012

Here’s a surprise: An environmental story with a happy ending whose heroes include Ronald Reagan, his secretary of state George Schultz and a now-forgotten bureaucrat named Lee Thomas, the EPA administration during Reagan’s second term.

These men helped bring us the Montreal Protocol, a international treaty that took effect in 1989 and since then has protected the earth’s fragile ozone lawyer by phasing out the production of chemicals including chlorofluorocarbons, which were commonly found in spray cans and refrigeratants. The NRDC’s David Doniger calls the Montreal Protocol “the world’s most effective environmental treaty.”

The story of the Montreal Protocol is told in a new documentary film called Shattered Sky by directors Steve Dorst and Dan Evans. It had its premiere on Sunday at the Environmental Film Festival in Washington.  The hour-long film cuts back and forth between the story of the ozone layer, and the (so far) unsuccessful efforts by US environmentalists to enact legislation to curb climate change, most recently in 2010, when a comprehensive cap-and-trade scheme to regulate carbon pollution failed in the Senate.

“Why aren’t we as Americans stepping up?” asked Dan Evans, during a panel discussion that followed the Shattered Sky screening at the Carnegie Institution. The film takes a decidedly middle-of-the-road position, avoiding, for the most part, the polarizing rhetoric that characterizes so much talk about climate. “We hope this film will appeal to folks, regardless of their political stripes,” Dan said.

While I buy into the basic message of Shattered Sky–that if we solved the ozone problem by pushing for an international treaty, we can do the same with climate–I can’t say that I loved the film. It lacks a compelling narrative, and none of the characters get enough screen time to really come to life. Film is an emotional medium, but there’s not much emotion here. The filmmakers might have done better by digging deeper into the ozone story: describing the roles of scientists Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work on ozone chemistry, the work of crusaders at NRDC who brought a lawsuit compelling EPA to act and the dilemmas facing the business people at DuPont who first opposed any action but later came around when they sensed business opportunity.

What’s more, the parallels between the climate crisis and the ozone problem are imperfect at best, as the film notes. Climate and energy are at the heart of the economy; spray cans and refrigerants are a sideshow. Consumers can’t easily express a preference for clean energy over fossil fuels; they can, and did, stop buying aerosol cans after they were warned of the environmental harms. People quickly understood the risks created by a hole in the ozone layer–sunburn!–but for reasons that remain unclear to me, they don’t worry about the peril of climate change.

He helped save the ozone layer

Having said that, this film is valuable and well worth seeing because it reminds us that, until very recently,  the environment was not a partisan issue. Republicans have often led important environmental initiatives. Teddy Roosevelt gave us the National Park Service. Richard Nixon created the EPA. Reagan backed the Montreal Protocol. George H.W. Bush helped solve the acid rain problem through a cap-and-trade system to regulate coal plants. Conservation is a conservative idea. [click to continue…]

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Zimride: Reinventing the road trip

March 25, 2012

Hitchhiking is so yesterday.  A San Francisco-based startup called Zimride is using the power of social media to connect drivers with people needing rides–saving people money, helping the environment and sometimes helping its customers make new friends.

“Zimriding is really fun,” says John Zimmer, the company’s co-founder and chief operating officer.”We’ve had people who have met a girlfriend or boyfriend, or found a new job.”

When I first heard about Zimride, I was dubious. Is there really a business in car pooling, especially when it requires riding with a stranger?

After talking with John, and learning more about the company, I’ve changed my mind. Zimride could grow into a nice business. It’s off to a good start: Built on college campuses, around workplaces and events, Zimride by last summer had formed more than 26,000 carpools, created more than 100 million shared miles and saved drivers more than $50 million in expenses. Last September, Zimride raised $6 million in venture capital from investors Mayfield Fund, Floodgate and K9 Ventures. Facebook’s fbFund provided $250,000 in seed funding back in 2008. [click to continue…]

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My No. 1 best-selling book

March 23, 2012

It’s not just Republicans who ignore or deny the reality of climate change. Yesterday in Cushing, OK, President Obama spoke about an oil pipeline and said, according to The Times:

As long as I’m president, we’re going to keep on encouraging oil development and infrastructure, and we’re going to do it in a way that protects the health and safety of the American people.

Uh, no. There’s no way to safely burn coal, oil and natural gas — unless we find a way to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

That’s why I wrote my ebook, Suck It Up: How capturing carbon from the air can help solve the climate crisis. Eventually, we need to stop burning fossil fuels. But there’s no evidence that we’re going to do so anytime soon. So we need to think differently about the climate crisis, and to explore alternative solutions. Part of the answer will be to find ways to capture, recycle and reuse CO2.

In Suck It Up, you’ll meet the pioneering  scientist-entrepreneurs and the well-to-do investors, including Bill Gates, who are developing technology to capture CO2 from the air. Published as an Amazon Kindle Single, the book takes about an hour to read and costs $1.99. It’s free if you are an Amazon Prime member and you own a Kindle.

Some people have asked whether they can read the book if they don’t own a Kindle. The answer? Yes! Suck It Up can be read on a variety of platforms including on a PC, on a Mac, on an Android phone, on a Windows phone, on a BlackBerry, or even on the Web.  If you can read this blog you can read the book.

As for my claim about hitting best-seller status, it’s true, although misleading. Here’s the proof:

The “trick” here is that Amazon publishes dozens, if not hundreds, of best-seller lists. This one lists best-sellers in Environmental Economics. The truth is, sales of the book have been disappointing, perhaps because the climate issue is so far from the center of the political agenda. Fortunately, I didn’t write this book to make money. I wrote it to spread an idea that matters and to provoke conversation.

That conversation has begun.Matt Wald, the veteran energy reporter at The New York Times, wrote about the book on the paper’s Green blog. It was excerpted by YaleEnvironment360, by GE’s Ecomagination website and on Grist. In  a blogpost at Forbes, writer Greg Unruh called it “a must-read for sustainability professionals.” Other reviews have been good.

But like most authors, I’m not satisfied. I’d like more readers and more conversation. So please check out the book, tell me what you think and help spread the word. Are you listening, Planet Money or Ira Flatow?

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Expo West: Beyond chocolate and chia

March 21, 2012

Today’s guest post comes from the aptly-named Catherine Greener, the CEO of co-founder of consulting firm Clear Green Advisors. Cat, as she’s known, is one of the sharpest people in the world of environmental consulting. A native of Detroit who is trained as a industrial engineer, she’s an expert in manufacturing, among other things, and began her career as a maintenance supervisor for Pontiac Motors. Cat knows how things get done, and she knows business, too–she has an MBA from Michigan and has advised Procter & Gamble, FedEx, Shell, Nissan and Ingersoll Rand, among others. She filed this report after a trip to Natural Products Expo West, a giant trade show held every year in Anaheim, CA.

Back at my desk in Boulder after three days at Natural Products Expo West, the largest convention of people in the natural, organic and supplements industries, I am tired and I have a list of people to email or call. But I am filled with an optimism that is rare after attending a trade show.

At Expo West, as it’s known, about 50,000 or so vendors, retailers, buyers and product seekers convened in Anaheim to learn about emerging ideas and and exciting new products in these high growth businesses, which encompass everything from raw organic energy bars to shampoo made from beer. I took the opportunity to listen to legends like Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farm, meet authors including Paul Greenberg (Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food) and enjoy a beer with Adam Lowry, Co-founder of Method, one of the leaders of a new wave of young entrepreneurs.

Expo West overwhelms the senses. The vast convention center is filled with organic chocolate that will stop you in your tracks, essential oils, raw vitamin drinks, gluten-free grilled cheese sandwiches— and something even for the eyes—the chance to be photographed with Fabio.

I attend Expo West to see trends. This year’s product trends were easy to spot: raw, GMO-free, gluten-free (and delicious) and Chia, which is not just for “pets” anymore, but is being added to foods for its health benefits (Omega-3′s and fiber).

But for me, at least, the most interesting trend at this year’s Expo West had nothing to do with products; it had to do with the companies that were exhibiting–the emergence of the Benefit Corporation, or “B-Corp”.

King Arthur Flour proudly displayed their B-Corp logo next to their other 3rd-party certifications.  Why should this matter? Shouldn’t only the quality of the product matter to the shopper? “Consumers are interested in the type of company that you are, just as much as the kind and quality of the product that you make,” explains Tom Payne, Director of Marketing, at King Arthur Flour.

I may be going out on a limb, but it feels like a movement is growing here. Companies that are good for the world want to “occupy your cart, refrigerator or cupboard.” And shoppers seem ready to listen.

Consumers want to know more–not just about what they are buying, but who they are buying from. They want to know if there is “pink slime” in their kid’s lunch, or if their cans have BPA in the liner, and, if so, why a company felt the need to use it there. If a company can assumer its customers that it is providing them with the most natural and healthy product possible, and that it cares about the community and the planet, and that it embraces a new way of doing business, it can build a powerful brand around transparency, authenticity and trust.

I look forward to Expo West 2013. As for trends, I think we are going to see even more Certified B Corps. It’s the right marketplace. It’s the right message.

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GM, RelayRides: Strange green bedfellows

March 19, 2012

General Motors is in the business of selling as many cars as it can.

But you may not need to own a car, says Shelby Clark the co-founder and chief community officer of RelayRides, a peer-to-peer car sharing service.

So why is General Motors investing in, and supporting RelayRides?

That was the question on my mind last week when I moderated a panel called Connected Cars and Beyond  at VERGE DC, a conference organized by GreenBiz, where I’m a senior writer.

Shelby Clark

Shelby Clark was on the panel and so was Nick Pudar, vice president of planning and business development at GM’s OnStar unit. GM Ventures, the venture capital arm of General Motors, has invested in RelayRides. (See my blogpost, Car sharing, revving up). Its OnStar unit is going further, by making it much easier for RelayRides to do what it does: play digital matchmaker between car owners and renters.

RelayRides launched in Boston and San Francisco, but recently became the first of a bevy of peer-to-peer car sharing firms to go national. Renters typically pay $5 to $9 per hour–they set the rates–and owners get 65% of the revenues, with the rest going to RelayRides. The median age of both owners and renters is the mid-30s, and they aren’t entirely motivated by money. “Frequently, it’s the environmental and community benefits they like,” Shelby said. [click to continue…]

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Steve Case and “the second Internet revolution”

March 18, 2012

Interviewing Steve Case at VERGE DC

Steve Case is having a pretty good second act.

Case, as you surely remember, led America Online to glory and riches during the Internet boom. The first Internet firm to go public, AOL was the best performing stock of the 1990s, with a 11,616% (!!) return. That put the upstart in a position to acquire media giant Time Warner, in the largest merger in business history, and one of the most ill-fated.

Case, who is 53, is back, and he’s busy, as the chairman and CEO of Revolution, a company that “invests in people and ideas that can change the world;” as chairman of the Case Foundation, which is mostly run by his wife Jean; as chairman of the Startup America Partnership, a nonprofit that supports startups in a variety of ways, and as a member of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, which has him advocating bipartisan legislation to make financing for startups easier.

What ties all those interests together is Case’s belief that entrepreneurs are the “secret sauce” that keeps the American economy humming, he told me last week at VERGE DC, a conference organized by GreenBiz about the convergence of energy, information, buildings and transportation..

“I really do believe that entrepreneurs change the world,” he says. “They’re willing to take risks, start companies around new products, ideas or services and in many cases new industries emerge. That’s why we’re the leading economy in the world. It didn’t happen by accident. FORTUNE 500 companies don’t instantly vault into being FORTUNE 500 companies. Walmart started as one little store in Bentonville, Ark.”

“I saw it first-hand with America Online. We started in 1985. Three percent of people were online. They were online for an average of one hour per week. We said, someday this is going to be a ubiquitous medium that’s going to change the world, that everybody would be connected all the time, with multiple devices. It took a quarter century to get there, but now we’re there.”

“We’re now ushering the second Internet revolution,” he went on. “Now that everyone’s connected through multiple devices, connecting more habitually and more mobile-ly, you’re now able to have a transformative impact not just on media and communications and financial services, but on other core foundational industries in our country — energy being a key one, health care being a key one, education being a key one.”

“They actually have not changed that much,” he said. “But I have no doubt over the next 25 years those industries will be fundamentally reshaped, transformed, disrupted by this second Internet revolution, and that provides a real opportunity for entrepreneurs who are challenging the status quo, playing an attacker role.” [click to continue…]

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(Solar) power to the people

March 14, 2012

A Grid Alternatives installation in Kerman, CA

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

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

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

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

March 11, 2012

Klaus Lackner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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When “green business” isn’t enough

March 7, 2012

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

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

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

Reclaiming (valuable) aluminum cans

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

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

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

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