You’ve heard about the cloud, right? This blog comes to you from the cloud. The cloud is where the bank keeps your money. YouTube, Gmail, Twitter and iTunes live in the cloud. So does a record of all my runs in 2011. The cloud, in essence, is the millions of data centers where information and software are stored and can be accessed by gazillions of computers.

Unfortunately, the cloud is creating problems for the planet.

Which bring us to Facebook and its coal problem. By some accounts, Facebook is the world’s most visited website. Greenpeace, as a result, has made Facebook the target of a campaign called Unfriend Coal, which has its own Facebook pages (of course!) with more than 700,000 fans. (Another 500,000 orFacebook recently opened a big new data center in Prineville, Oregon, where electricity is generated mostly from burning coal.   Greenpeace is asking the social media giant to power its services with renewable energy instead of coal and nuclear power.

In response, Facebook–like the rest of the IT industry–mostly talks about efficiency. The Prineville data center is super efficient, by all accounts. What’s more, to its credit, Facebook is sharing much of what it has learned about making data centers more efficient in its Open Compute project.

The trouble is, efficiency is a necessary, but insufficient response to the threat of climate change.

Or as Daniel Kessler, a Greenpeace campaigner, told me: “It’s solving for half the equation.”

Here’s why: The cloud is growing fast. In a tweet after New Year’s Day, Facebook said that people uploaded “a record 750 million photos” over the weekend.  YouTube says that 24 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute. I’ve got 7.3 gigabytes of email stored in my Gmail account, enough so that I recently had to write a small check to Google.

There’s no way that efficiency can offset the impact of all that growth. Indeed, all these companies are rapidly building big new data centers.

In a study on the Internet’s growth released last month, Greenpeace estimated that data centers currently consume 1.5-2% of all global electricity and are growing at a rate of 12% per year. The report is available for download here.

Gary Cook, Greenpeace IT Policy Analyst, is quoted as saying:

We think consumers want to know that when they upload a video or change their Facebook status that they are not contributing to toxic coal ash, global warming or future Fukishima’s.

Green IT should not be a choice between energy efficiency and clean electricity – companies need to give equal attention to both for green data centers.

This is an important point, relevant to all of the tech companies (IBM, HP, Google, Yahoo!, etc) that like to talk about how they are making their data centers more efficient. They need to think, not just about how much energy they are using, but what kind of energy, to minimize their carbon emissions. HP Labs, for example, has designed a cow-powered data center, which could be powered using waste from dairy farms, but it has yet to build one.

Instead, as Greenpeace notes, Google, Apple and Facebook are operating, building or expanding their data centers in North Carolina, where cheap and dirty coal-powered electricity is abundant and where tax breaks were made available by the state government. This make sense for their businesses, but no matter how efficient those data centers are, they are adding greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere.

The Greenpeace report offered some praise to Yahoo!, which has sited data centers near sources of renewable energy, and Google, which has invested in wind, solar and geothermal power. Google has made two major power purchase agreements for wind energy with Next Era, as Todd Woody reports in Grist.

By contrast, Facebook gets about 53% of its electricity from coal, Greenpeace estimates, slightly more than the national average.

Now, this is a complicated issue, to be sure. Posting photos on Facebook is “greener” than printing them out and sharing them with friends, and email has a lower carbon footprint, safe to say, that letters sent via the postal service.

More important, the power of information technology is crucial to addressing energy and climate issues, whether we’re talking about the smart grid, smart buildings, electric cars, managing traffic congestion, finding parking places, or organizing climate activists.

But if companies like Facebook want to be part of the energy/climate solution, and not part of the problem, they need to find ways to stop burning dirty coal–sooner rather than later.

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[Disclosure: I was paid by Hewlett Packard to moderate two events on energy-efficient data centers.]

Bob Langert worked in logistics for McDonald’s in the late 1980s when he was asked to take on a “temporary” six-month assignment to get chlorofluorocarbons out of the company’s clamshell packages.

Twenty years later, Bob has worked with WWF and Conservation International on marine stewardship and sustainable beef, spent a decade with Temple Grandin dealing with animal welfare issues, visited chicken farms and slaughterhouses, picked tomatoes with migrant workers in Florida, lectured on sustainability in China and taken a nine-day raft trip down the Amazon River with his pals at Greenpeace.

“I never, ever imagined this,” Bob said. “To have the good fortune to do this work, and make a difference in the world is beyond my expectations.”

I interviewed Bob, who is vice president for corporate social responsibility, at McDonald’s, today at the State of Green Business Forum in Chicago. We talked about what he’d learned about working with NGOs, his accomplishments, frustrations and whether selling hamburgers can be “green.”

Here are a few highlights:

A pioneering partnership: Langert’s work with packaging led to a partnership with the Environmental Defense Fund, which ruffled feathers in the corporate world and the environmental community.

“Fred Krupp [EDF’s chief] was a visionary back then,” Bob said. “It was not politically correct to work with big companies.”

EDF’s crew did a shift working in a McDonald’s, and proceeded to help with dozens of initiatives—from trimming the size of straws to using recycled paper in napkins.

Recalled Bob: “We didn’t spend one penny more. We saved millions and millions of pounds of packaging and costs.”

The future of fish: McDonald’s joined with the WWF to develop guidelines for the companies that supply its fish. What’s the business case, I asked, for investing corporate time and money in sustainable fisheries?

“Assured supply,” Langert replied. “The guy in charge of buying fish for McDonald’s, he was really concerned with being able to buy fish 10 or 20 years from now….The No. 1 job of everyone in supply chain at McDonald’s is to make sure we have stuff on the menu tomorrow.”

This kind of long-term thinking—so rare in big public companies—is a key to sustainability.

Picking tomatoes: When McDonald’s was urged to support efforts by migrant workers in Florida to win better wages, Langert worked side by side with the pickers. “ I couldn’t keep up with people half my size,” he remembered. “Females doing the work all day long in the sun and you see the living conditions which are not good at all.” Just last month,  the workers hashed out an agreement that should bring them higher pay.

Bears and the Amazon: When Greenpeace protesters dressed as chickens picketed a McDonald’s in London, accusing the company of destroying the Amazon, Langert’s first job was to calm down his colleagues.

He recalled saying: “Let’s not get all in a tizzy about their tactics. Greenpeace doesn’t have an advertising budget, so they had to use McDonald’s to get the word out. Let’s look at the issue.” The allegation was that tropical forest was being cut down to grow soy to feed chickens in Europe that became McNuggets.

When he asked trusted partners at Conservation International and WWF about the charge, he decided Greenpeace had a point. He approached the group and, before long, McDonald’s, Greenpeace and big suppliers like Cargill had agreed to stop buying soy from deforested land.

The raft trip came later. “We spent nine days—four of us from McDonald’s, four of us from Greenpeace, to get the lay of the land. I gave up a Chicago Bears Superbowl game to go so that tells you where my passion is. Anyone who knows me knows that besides my family and my faith, it’s the Chicago Bears.”

Langert’s to-do list: He’d like to find new ways to engage consumers in McDonald’s sustainability work. The company serves about 64 million people a day.

He also wants to do more to reduce the environmental impact of the company’s 33,000 stores, most of which are  owned and operated by others. “Energy’s a big issue for us,” he said. New initiatives are on the way, he hinted.

The problem with burgers: Because beef has such a big environmental footprint, I asked Bob how he could reconcile the company’s desire to grow—and sell more beef—with its environmental ethic. I told him that my rabbi, Fred Dobb, has said that one of the easiest things people can do to help the planet is to eat less beef, and asked if McDonald’s would try to wean its customers away from Big Macs.

“I’d like to talk with your rabbi,” Bob replied. He acknowledged the beef production has a big footprint, but said that “at the end of the day, we’re going to give people what they want. We’re going to do it in a good, responsible, clean, safe way. We’ve tried veggie burgers. They hardly sell at all. The day we can sell 500 a week in a restaurant, they’ll be on our menu forever and ever. I don’t have angst. You’ve got to face the realities of the world. And the reality of the world is that people eat protein from livestock and meat. Nothing wrong with that from my moral compass. I respect others that have a different moral compass. It’s our job as a company to make things better, though. We’re starting on that path–working with WWF on sustainable beef. That’s the  next step.”

Certainly McDonald’s offers choices to those who would prefer to avoid beef. Hey, the company even gave out pedometers and yoga CDs a few years ago to encourage people to be more active. But…given the climate crisis and the obesity crisis, maybe the next step ought to be to encourage those 64 million customers to make choices that are healthier for themselves and for the planet.

“The Power of One” is a series of stories about people who have helped their companies become more sustainable. (See earlier stories on UL Environment, eBay, and Union Pacific.) They can’t do it alone, of course. But by coming up with a good idea, enlisting the help of others and making persuasive arguments, one person can change a company and, sometimes, more. Today’s story — the last in the series, at least for now — is about a manager at Coca-Cola who knows what it feels  like to have the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Meet Bryan Jacob. Back in 1990, when he made the cover of Weightlifting USA, he was a 21-year-old  student at Georgia Tech, hoping to represent the United States in Olympic Games. He did so, twice–in Barcelona in 1992, when he finished 18th in the Featherweight division and in Atlanta in 1996, when he finished 8th in the  Bantamweight  competition. He was the top U.S. performer in his weight class both times. He’s still fit–with a firm handshake.

It’s a good thing that Bryan is accustomed to heavy lifting  because his current job, as energy and climate protection manager for Coca-Cola, is a big one: He leads Coke’s global effort to reduce the greenhouse gases that are emitted from the 10 million–yes, 10 million!–vending machines and coolers that are part of Coke’s global bottling system. The company and its bottling partners have begun to replace coolers that use the  most common refrigerants, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which are also called   fluorinated gases (F-gases), with so-called natural refrigerants such as CO2, propane or isobutane.

Last year, the company and its bottling partners said they expected

that 100 percent of their new vending machines and coolers will be HFC-free by 2015. We’re hopeful our aggregate demand will encourage supply as a means of accelerating the transition to HFC-free refrigeration equipment. This announcement is a direct result of work with Greenpeace that began in 2000.

Yes, that’s right–Coke’s key partner on its journey to natural refrigeration is Greenpeace, which is better known for civil disobedience than corporate partnerships. “The Greenpeace relationship went from very confrontational to one of the most collaborative we have,” Bryan says.

Bryan, in fact, says he’s learned that NGO partners can deliver a lot of value when you are trying to ,spark change in a sprawling company like Coca-Cola. He’s worked with Greenpeace, WWF, the World Resources Institute and even Dr. Rajendra K. Pauchari, the sometimes-controversial chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Bryan once brought “Pachy,” as he’s called, to speak with a convention of Coke bottlers in Boca Raton.

Like politics, the environmental movement can create strange bedfellows.

I emailed Amy Larkin, who leads business partnerships for Greenpeace, to ask about her work with Bryan and Coca-Cola. She replied:

Bryan Jacob is the kind of colleague everyone wishes they had.  He is determined, indefatigable and inventive.  Bryan is also open to new ideas — even big crazy ideas that will require a huge amount of work to make real.  Maybe those are his favorite ideas…….not sure.

Greenpeace has worked with Bryan for many years on HFC-free refrigeration and some of our meetings were rather difficult.  Bryan’s entire demeanor and way of working always encourage constructive engagement and he is a central ingredient in our successful outcome with Coca-Cola.

As it happens, Bryan is not one of those environmentalists who grew up green. He figured that he’d one day build dams, bridges, highways and airports, as he worked towards a degree in civil engineering. (“Most of the time, I’m civil,” he jokes, “but when I get agitated I can get hostile.”) Instead, he took a job during college with an environmental consulting firm, got excited about the field and then found his way to Coca-Cola.

This was 1993, three years before the Olympics were coming to Atlanta. Bryan got the job, in part, because Coke’s sports marketing department had set aside budget to hire Olympic athletes. But he was assigned to work on refrigeration because the company was then undergoing an earlier transformation, away from ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) to hyrdrofluorocarbons (HFCs) which would not damage the ozone layer. This was a result of the global treaty known as the Montreal Protocol, which has succeeded in allowing the ozone layer to repair itself.

The trouble is, HFCs are potent greenhouse gases, thousands of times as potent as carbon dioxide. (HFC-134a, for example, a common refrigerant, has a global warming potential that is 1,430 times that of CO2.)  While they currently have a relatively small aggregate impact on global warming, some people project that HFC emissions will represent 9-19% of projected greenhouse gas emissions in 2050.

“Almost as soon as we began converting to HFCs,” Bryan recalls, “the environmental community started telling us that there was another alternative. Greenpeace in particular.”

An HFC-free cooler

The challenge, since then, has been developing cost-effective alternatives to HFCs and persuading the bottlers across the vast Coca-Cola system to adopt. Like so many environmental issues where science and economics are intertwined, this is complicated. The company has had to develop new technology and cooperate with its competitors, at a time when there’s no regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.

In Coke: The Green Thing, a long story about the company’s sustainability efforts than ran on Fortune.com in 2008, I wrote this about the refrigeration work:

Coke has invested $40 million in research and testing, published a 900-page technical study and organized a coalition of companies that sell cold drinks and ice cream, including Unilever, McDonald’s and (gasp!) PepsiCo., to attack the problem. Last year, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Coke declared victory: E. Neville Isdell, the company’s chairman and CEO, and Gerd Leipold, who leads Greenpeace, unveiled a new, HFC-free, super-efficient vending machine. About 8,000 of the climate-friendly machines have been deployed, most to high-profile venues like Davos and the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

..But HFCs are still being used as a coolant in nearly all coolers and vending machines because the alternative developed by Coke and others–a coolant that uses carbon dioxide–is more expensive. It requires retooling the industry, with no direct payback.

Since then, Bryan tells me, Coca-Cola has rolled out another 220,000 units of HFC-free equipment. That’s progress, but it’s a long way from 10 million. By working with a coalition called Refrigerants, Naturally! to stimulate more demand for the HFC-free equipment, Coca-Cola hopes to bring prices down.

As if that weren’t enough, Bryan is also focused on driving energy efficiency in the system’s manufacturing plants around the world and in exploring more energy-efficient, low-carbon distribution options for Coke and its bottlers’ fleets.

Bryan Jacob

I asked Bryan what he’d learned from more than a decade of working on climate and energy issues inside the world’s largest beverage company. Here’s what he told me:

First, collaboration with NGOs is valuable. “Nothing is accomplished by an individual,” he says.” “It’s always a team effort.” He took WWF officials on a road show to visit Coke’s seven largest bottlers around the world, and helped organize “greenhouse gas mitigation strategy workshops” for the bottlers. He brought in Jonathan Pershing, then of the World Resources Institute, now a top climate negotiator for the government, to explain how climate change might affect Coke, and how Coke could contribute to solving the problem. Interestingly, even though Coke’s CEO, Muhtar Kent, and his predecessor, Neville Isdell, have been visible environmental advocates, they needed outside experts to help them make the case.

Second, set ambitious targets and don’t be afraid to fail. The company has said it will grow its business, but not its greenhouse gas emissions, throughout the system and it has promised to cut absolute emissions in the developed world (Annex I countries, in UN-speak) by 5% from a 2004 baseline by 2015.  “Transparency and disclosure and committing yourself to targets are the hallmarks of any leading company,” Bryan says. Setting hard-to-achieve targets spurs innovation.

And if the company fails to meet its goals? Bryan says he hopes that “we will be rewarded for what we do achieve, rather than criticized for what we don’t.”

His experience as an Olympic athlete taught him to reach for a big goal, and then feel good if you’ve worked hard to achieve it. “I didn’t win a medal,” he says. “I finished ninth. Does that mean I’m a loser. No. I’m a winner.”

Hard to argue with that, whether we’re taking sports or weightier matters.

Here’s a press release from Kimberly-Clark, the forest products giant announcing new fiber sourcing standards.  Greenpeace has ended its hard-hitting “Kleercut” campaign. No time right now for analysis, but I want to update yesterday’s post with details of the agreement. (The bold highlights are my own.)

Here, too, is a link to a Greenpeace video celebrating the end of the campaign.

And a link to Greenpeace campaigner Scott Paul’s blog where he asks: “Hey Proctor & Gamble (maker of Charmin and Bounty) and Georgia Pacific (maker of Angel Soft and Brawny), you reading this?”

Scott also writes: “Buy me a beer and I’ll bend your ear with some of the most inspirational, innovative, dedicated and downright hysterical things that happened during this campaign… and all staying within our core values of peaceful protest. Marshall McLuhan and the Quakers would be proud.”

Washington, D.C.– Aug. 5, 2009 — Kimberly-Clark Corporation, the maker of Kleenex, Scott and Cottonelle brands, today announced stronger fiber sourcing standards that will increase conservation of forests globally and will make the company a leader for sustainably produced tissue products. Greenpeace, which worked with Kimberly-Clark on its revised standards, announced that it will end its “Kleercut” campaign, which focused on the company and its brands.

“We are committed to using environmentally responsible wood fiber and today’s announcement enhances our industry-leading practices in this area,” said Suhas Apte, Kimberly-Clark Vice President of Environment, Energy, Safety, Quality and Sustainability. “It is our belief that certified primary wood fiber and recycled fiber can both be used in an environmentally responsible way and can provide the product performance that customers and consumers expect from our well-known tissue brands. We commend Greenpeace for helping us develop more sustainable standards.”

Kimberly-Clark has set a goal of obtaining 100 percent of the company’s wood fiber for tissue products, including the Kleenex brand, from environmentally responsible sources. The revised standards will enhance the protection of Endangered Forests and increase the use of both Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified fiber and recycled fiber. By the end of 2011, Kimberly-Clark will ensure that 40 percent of its North American tissue fiber – representing an estimated 600,000 tonnes – is either recycled or FSC certified, an increase of more than 70 percent over 2007 levels.

“Today, ancient forests like the Boreal Forest have won,” said Richard Brooks, Greenpeace Canada Forest Campaign Coordinator. “This new relationship between Kimberly-Clark and Greenpeace will promote forest conservation, responsible forest management, and recycled fiber as far and wide as possible.”

Also by the end of 2011, Kimberly-Clark will eliminate the purchase of any fiber from the Canadian Boreal Forest that is not FSC certified. This forest is North America’s largest old growth forest, providing habitat for threatened wildlife such as woodland caribou and a sanctuary for more than one billion migratory birds. It is also the largest terrestrial storehouse of carbon on the planet, storing the equivalent of 27 years worth of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Furthermore, the revised standards reinforce Kimberly-Clark’s long-standing ban on use of wood fiber from illegal sources; adds a preference for post-consumer recycled fiber; and supports expansion of recycling initiatives and the identification, mapping and protection of areas that have the potential to be designated as Endangered or High Conservation Value forests.

“These revised standards are proof that when responsible companies and Greenpeace come together, the results can be good for business and great for the planet,” said Scott Paul, Greenpeace USA Forest Campaign Director. “Kimberly-Clark’s efforts are a challenge to its competitors. I hope other companies pay close attention.”

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Greenpeace targets Kimberly-Clark

For the last few years, Greenpeace has waged a relentless campaign against Kimberly-Clark, a $19-billion a year forest-products giant whose brands include Kleenex, Huggies, Scott, Pull-Ups and Cottonelle. Greenpeace accused K-C, among other things, of destroying ancient forests in Canada so we can all wipe our noses with Kleenex.

Kimberly-Clark also misled the public about its practices, as I reported back in 2006, citing Greenpeace’s research. (See Are Kleenex Tissues Wiping Out Forests? on Fortune.com.)

Now, it looks as if the antagonists have made peace. Kimberly-Clark and Greenpeace invited reporters to a Washington news conference tomorrow (8-5) and while neither side will talk yet, you can bet that they’ve made a deal.

Knowing Greenpeace as I do (my wife worked there for a couple of years), you can also be confident that K-C has agreed to make significant changes in its practices. Maybe the company will use more recycled stock in tissues? Maybe the company will use more wood that’s certified as sustainable by the Forest Stewardship Council? For sure, K-C will agree to take better care of Canada’s Boreal Forest, a focal point of the campaign, which began in 2004. We’ll know soon. [UPDATE: Here's the announcement.]

We already know that this has been a very tough campaign, waged on the Internet, with street protests and at shareholder meetings.

Greenpeace and its supporters built an anti-K-C website at http://www.kleercut.net. They made a video called What’s Inside Your Box of Kleenex? (The answer: “Some of our last remaining ancient forests.”) They got arrested at a K-C office in Knoxville, Tennessee. They published a Recycled Tissue Guide for mobile phones to steer consumers to more eco-friendly products. They helped persuade stores or dining halls at more than a dozen colleges to stop buying some or all of K-C products. (Among them: Harvard University, University of Miami, Rice University, American University, Wesleyan University, University of California-Berkeley, University of Vermont, University of Florida, and Northern Arizona University.) They confronted the Cottonelle “Be Kind To Your Behind” Puppy Bus when it toured New York and Philadelphia. They even subverted a Kleenex man-on-the-street ad campaign in New York, as you can see in the video at the end of this post, which conveys the flavor of the irreverent campaign. Drawers were dropped at one point, but we won’t go there…

It wasn’t just Greenpeace. The Natural Resources Defense Council spoke out against K-C, and shareholders, including the Domini group of mutual funds, took their concerns to K-C management.

Kimberly-Clark says its sources its wood sustainably and says on its website that “sustainability is a core value.” Last year, presumably in response to the campaign, Kimberly-Clark published a lifecycle analysis of tissues which found, somewhat surprisingly:

There is no environmental preference between the use of recycled or virgin fiber in the manufacture of K-C tissue products. Both types of fiber offer a similar range of environmental benefits and drawbacks. The sustainable management of both types of fiber depends on minimizing their environmental drawbacks and maximizing their benefits….The study concludes that the total environmental impacts associated with tissue products are modest relative to those of other household and commercial activities, such as driving a
car and commercial transport.

Well, sure–we didn’t need a study to know that blowing your nose has less environmental impact than driving an SUV. As for the claim that there’s nol benefit to using recycled product in K-C tissues, I supposed it’s possible but  hard to know, even after reading the study, how and why the researchers came to that conclusion. Companies with a strong environmental track record like Seventh Generation favor recycled stock for their paper goods.

Generally, it’s been my experience that anti-corporate campaigns like this one need a few things to succeed. They need to be smart and attention-getting and focused on brands. (It’s tough to go after a forest products company that does not sell branded consumer products.) They need to operate on several levels at once. (Private negotiations between the enviros and K-C have been unfolding for two years.) Most of all, the campaigns need to have substance behind them, Enviros usually target corporate laggards, not leaders.

I’ll update this post when more information becomes available. Speakers at the presser will be Suhas Apte, Kimberly-Clark Vice President of Environment, Energy, Safety, Quality and Sustainability; Scott Paul, Greenpeace USA Forest Campaign Director; and Richard Brooks, Greenpeace Canada Forest Campaign Coordinator.

Here’s the Greenpeace video.

Whatever you think of the people at Greenpeace, you’ve got to admit they are environmentalists with a sense of humor. Recently, Greenpeace published a scorecard that ranks supermarket chains on the sustainability of their seafood. It’s a serious analysis, intended to guide shoppers to those stores that recognize their responsibility to protect the oceans, and to pressure those stores that don’t. In the argot of activists, this is known as a “name ‘em and shame ‘em” strategy.

Then Greenpeace went a step further. It ridiculed Trader Joe’s, the national supermarket chain with the lowest ranking, by creating a website called Traitor Joe’s (“Your one-stop shop for ocean destruction”), producing an amusing video (below and at www.traitorjoe.com) and sending protesters dressed as Orange Roughy to a Trader Joe’s outlet in San Francisco, calling on the company to clean up its act.

While these tactics might not be well suited for, say, the World Resources Institute, the diversity of the environmental movement is a wonderful thing. Activists at groups like Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network or Friends of the Earth function, in essence, as the business development arms of the more collaborative, mainstream groups like the Environmental Defense Fund or Conservation International. Companies under  attack from Greenpeace or RAN often ask EDF or CI to help them dig out of trouble.

I didn’t write much about Greenpeace while my wife, Karen Schneider, worked there, but she has since moved on (to become a vice president for communications at the National Women’s Law Center), so I feel more comfortable reporting on Greenpeace. The Greenpeace gang can be aggressive—they oppose the Waxman-Markey climate change bill because, they say, it’s too weak to deal effectively with the threat of global warming—but to the surprise of some, they have also collaborated effectively with companies like Coca-Cola and Unilever, around the issue of HFC-free refrigerants. And they do solid research.

Greenpeace’s seafood study, called Carting Away the Oceans: How Grocery Stores are Emptying the Seas, is worth a look.  It ranks 20 supermarket companies and assesses their seafood policies (if any), initiatives they are taking to promote sustainability (again, if any), their approach to labeling, and their sales of so-called “red list” fish, meaning  fish that Greenpeace deems imperiled or those that come from fisheries that harm sea turtles, dolphins, seals, sea lions, or other marine mammals. Red list fish include, among others, Atlantic Cod, Atlantic haddock, Atlantic salmon, Atlantic sea scallops, Chilean sea bass, grouper, monkfish, ocean quahog, Orange Roughy, red snapper, redfish, skates, South Atlantic albacore tuna, swordfish, tropical shrimp and yellowfin tuna. (For another look at what seafood to buy and why, see the Seafood Watch list published by the Monterey Bay Acquarium.)

Fortunately, there is some good news in Greenpeace’s scorecard, its third since 2008. More than half of the  supermarket chains in the U.S. have made some progress in increasing the sustainability of their seafood operations, the group says. The Wegman’s chain received Greenpeace’s top ranking followed by Ahold USA, while Whole Foods dropped to third place from its first-place finish last December. Wal-Mart ranks No. 7. On the plus side, the report says:

Greenpeace is delighted to announce that several of the companies included in this report have not only shown great improvement, but continue to move toward being the first large-scale “green” seafood retailers in the United States. Interestingly, each store has found avenues within its unique business model to move toward a more sustainable way of sourcing and selling seafood. Examples of this kind of innovation are evident in the actions of retailers like Wegmans, Ahold, Whole Foods, and Target, each of which has made great strides in various areas.

But the report also chides the laggards, saying:

…there remain nine retailers that have made no visible effort whatsoever to increase the sustainability of their seafood operations. These industry laggards continue to wreak havoc on our environment, with no apparent regard for the health of our ecosystems or the values of their customers.

At this point, Greenpeace has little choice but to call out these gross offenders for who they are, and to strongly urge all consumers to avoid buying seafood from the following retailers: Aldi, Costco, Giant Eagle, H. E. B., Meijer, Price Chopper, Publix, Trader Joe’s, and Winn-Dixie.

Thus, the protest below at a Trader Joe’s in San Francisco:

Greenpeace protesters dressed as Orange Roughy at a Trader Joe's

“I can’t understand,” Al Gore said a while ago, “why there aren’t rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants.”

Just wait, Al. The Capitol Climate Action, a coalition of activist groups, is organizing what will almost surely be the largest mass civil disobedience for climate in U.S. history. The target: The Capitol Power Plant, a 99-year-old coal-burning plant, situated blocks from Capitol Hill, which heats and cools the U.S. Capitol. (It hasn’t generated electricity since 1952.) Organizers say the plant “symbolizes the stranglehold coal has over our government and future” and the nation’s wrong-headed climate policy. They also say:

As with Ghandi’s walk for independence and Martin Luther King’s march for equal rights, history now calls on people of conscience to peacefully take a principled stand on global warming.

This event could attract thousands of people. It’s endorsed by Greenpeace, the Rainforest Action Network, Global Exchange, SDS (who knew they were still around?) and Tikkun. The writer and activist Bill McKibben, poet and activist Wendell Berry and climate scientist James Hansen all plan to attend. Here’s a link to letter from McKibben and Berry, well worth reading, explaining the thinking behind the event.

Now, there are a lot of controversial questions about coal. Can it be made clean? How else will we power the future? Will more expensive, low-carbon fuels create a drag on the economy? But I was amused to stumble upon a different question that’s sparking debate among the young people planning to attend the action: What should one wear to a protest against coal?

You’ve heard of dress for success? This is all about dress for arrest.

The organizers’ website says: “We will be there in our dress clothes, and ask the same of you.” This led to a “Strategy Note” on a website called It’s Getting Hot in Here, Dispatches From the Youth Climate Movement, headlined: “Dress to Impress at the Capitol Climate Action” noting that McKibben and Berry had asked participants to dress in their “Sunday best.” Blogger Joshua Kahn Russell included this photo from the civil rights movement:

He wrote:

We understand that we are the inheritors of this spirit and its tone of seriousness and respectability. Throughout the labor movement and various currents for racial justice people have chosen to wear suits as part of their message they send through these bold actions.

Debate ensued. One commenter wrote:

I think encouraging people to dress up is capitulating to established power, as though decision-makers won’t listen to us unless we dress up…. We should dress the way we feel comfortable, not to “impress.” Impress who?

Another shot back:

thinking like yours is exactly why progressive movements don’t get anywhere fast. …It may not be ideal or how you think things should be, but appearances matter, and they matter a lot in this country.

Which led to:

Business suits are part of the dominant/hegemonic cultural symbols of Wall Street.

And finally:

Honestly, shouldn’t we be wearing recycled clothing or something so that we don’t look like a bunch of hypocrites?

You gotta love the left. People can argue about anything.

Seriously, though–I’m excited to see the momentum gathering behind this protest. It could deliver a much-needed sense of urgency and a powerful grass-roots boost to ongoing efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions and stop the construction of conventional coal-fired power plants that contribute to global warming. The issue is certainly generating attention. The business section of today’s New York Times ran an otherwise unremarkable story with the arresting headline, Is America Ready to Quit Coal?. Environmental groups like the Sierra Club, NRDC and Environmental Defense have filed lawsuits to block coal plants and lobbied state legislatures and Congress. What’s been missing is grass-roots action.

Here’s an online ad featuring Susan Sarandon, urging people to attend the protest. Protesters are being urged to get training in nonviolent civil disobedience before the event.

I’m planning to cover the March 2 protest. Not sure yet how I’ll be dressed.

(Disclosures: my wife Karen Schneider of Greenpeace helped create the Susan Sarandon video, with The Concept Farm, a New York ad agency. I’m writing and consulting with NRDC and Environmental Defense Fund.)

When I think about the causes of climate change, coal-fired power plants and SUVs come to mind. But refrigerants matter, too. Not the refrigerator in your kitchen–it’s unlikely to be emitting greenhouse gases–but the chemical refrigeratants known as HFCs and HCFCs in your car’s air conditioner, commercial coolers and industrial freezers can all escape and cause problems, particularly when they are manufactured or improperly thrown away.

This is one of those important, complicated, technical and potentially dull stories that I try to tackle from time to time, in this case in today’s Sustainability column. The issue got my attention when Ben & Jerry’s and Greenpeace announced that they were able to get permission from the U.S. EPA to introduce what they call a “cleaner, greener” refrigerator into the U.S. (Turns out EPA was an obstacle to cleaning up the refrigerator biz.) Some other big companies, including Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, have been working on the problem, too. Let’s hope they succeed so the rest of us don’t have to worry about it.

Here’s how the column begins:

No one wants melting ice cream. Nor do we want melting polar ice caps. The trouble is, keeping our ice cream cold warms the planet because powerful greenhouse gases are used in most refrigerators and freezers in the U.S.

That’s why environmentalists at Greenpeace have been working with some of the world’s biggest food makers – among them Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Unilever – to deploy refrigerators in supermarkets and convenience stores that are free of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which are potent greenhouse gases.

Just last month, Ben & Jerry’s, the Vermont-based ice cream maker owned by Unilever, announced plans to roll out the country’s first HFC-free freezers.

“A company can be responsible in terms of the environment, it can be proactive in terms of solving problems, and it can make money at the same time,” said company co-founder Ben Cohen when he introduced the freezers at an ice-cream store in Washington, D.C. “That’s what we should expect from all corporations in this country.”

You can read the rest of the column here.