Fred Krupp is like a Timex watch.
He takes a licking but keeps on ticking.
Those of you old enough to remember the commercials when Timex tortured its seemingly indestructible watches, using high divers, water skiers, dishwashers, jackhammers, and the propeller of an outboard motor, know what I mean.
Except that the instruments of torture that Fred has endured as he has labored, literally for decades, to get climate change legislation through Congress include coal-state Senators, Republican obstructionists, Washington trade associations, a largely indifferent press corps and left-wing green groups that accuse the Environmental Defense Fund, which he leads, of selling out to big business.
If nothing else, you’ve got to admire his persistence.
It can’t be easy to calmly discuss the need for cap-and-trade legislation and the challenge of getting 60 votes in the Senate while oil is fouling the Gulf of Mexico, global temperatures are rising and atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are reaching dangerous levels.
Yet that’s Fred–calm, rational, pragmatic and seemingly undeterred by the fact that there appears to be only an outside chance that climate-change legislation will be passed this year, that next year looks a whole lot worse and that the congressional clock is ticking down.
Today, EDF invited reporters to the Washington offices of the Glover Park Group to hear Fred and Steve Cochran, the group’s chief lobbyist, make a last-ditch plea for a scaled-back bill, one with an emissions cap that initially covers only the utility industry.
They conceded for the first time publicly that EDF won’t get the economy-wide cap that it really wants and also, for the first time, gently criticized President Obama and urged him to back up his climate-change rhetoric with action. (more…)
Walmart and GE are the superpowers of corporate sustainability. They have enormous impact (WMT) and influence (GE). Recently, I hosted a dinner about sustainability for Motorola where an executive named Bill Olson described how the company developed its 
Until now, Walmart’s bold sustainability efforts were marred by a glaring omission.
In Washington, it’s a popular climate conundrum everyone talks about: Even if the U.S. lowers its greenhouse gas emissions, China and India are on track to dwarf the entire Western World’s as they build enormous coal-fired power plants. Politicians regularly say we must get China and India to use less coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, to power their emerging economies.
