This blogpost about climate preparedness is part of the 2012 State of Green Business Report, published by GreenBiz, where I’m a senior writer. You can download a copy of the full report here.

Last December, government officials, corporate executives and activists met in Durban, South Africa, for high-level climate talks. They went home with an agreement … to keep talking. Meanwhile, we’re emitting more carbon dioxide every year, and atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are steadily rising. If CO2 levels were somehow to stabilize now–they won’t–the world will keep warming. The bottom line: Climate change is inevitable. The world needs to learn how to prepare for it.

Increasingly, smart businesses are starting to do just that. Utilities, the oil and gas industry, agricultural companies and insurers are building assumptions about rising temperatures and extreme weather events into their scenario planning. This is what’s being called climate adaptation or climate preparedness.

The payoff from investing in adaptation could be substantial.  In 2011, insured losses in the U.S. from natural catastrophes, including tornadoes, floods and hurricanes, topped $105 billion, breaking the record of $101 billion set in 2005, the year of Hurricane Katrina, according to Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurance firm. Some of those losses had nothing to do with climate change, but others did.

Let’s get specific about what adaptation means: Entergy, an $11 billion-a-year utility company based in New Orleans, commissioned a Gulf Coast Adaptation Study that has opened up conversations with customers and elected officials about preparing for a warming climate. Not surprisingly, the company got focused on the problem after Hurricanes Rita and Katrina hit in 2005, followed in 2008 by Gustav.

“That really put a face on what the future was going to be like,” said Jeff Williams, director of climate consulting for Entergy. “Clearly we are facing risks from sea level rise, more intense storms, flooding and surge damage.” The company has looked at “hardening” key assets including power plants, substations and transmission lines; the goal is to make Entergy “more resilient in ways that minimize business interruption loss,” Williams says.

For example, Entergy has begun a five-year $73.5 million project to relocate and harden transmission and distribution lines serving Port Fourchon, LA, which is the single largest point of entry for crude oil coming into the U.S., handling about 13 percent of national imports. (After Katrina damaged the electrical instructure, 25 percent of oil production and 44 percent of natural gas production became shut in, Entergy says. National oil prices went from $60/bbl before Katrina to $70/bbl after Katrina because of supply interruption; national natural gas prices went from $8/Mcf to $15/Mcf.) Smaller businesses are acting, too. The McIlhenny Co., which makes Tabasco Sauce and was founded in 1868 on coastal Avery Island, LA, has made its factory and visitor center more resilient to better absorb future storms.

Agriculture is another industry that will be reshaped by a warming world, with some regions and crops doing better, thanks to a longer growing season and higher levels of CO2 in the air, and other suffering. Seed companies have renewed their efforts to develop drought resistant crops, said John Soper, director of product development at Pioneer,  a unit of DuPont.

“We’re expecting some drier weather to move into the key corn growing areas,” he says. “The climate in Illinois might be more like the climate in Arkansas.” Pioneer is testing drought-resistant corn and other crops in desert-like test fields in California and Chile, he said, in part because farmers who now irrigate their fields are already telling Pioneer that they expect limits on the availability of water. In India, Pioneer is working to develop drought-tolerant varieties of rice, which is now grown on flooded land but may have to adapt to a drier climate. Other seed companies including Monsanto, Syngenta and Bayer Crop Science are working on their own drought-resistant crops.

The insurance industry, meanwhile, has been declining to write property coverage along the Atlantic Coast, in part because of fears that stronger hurricanes will do more wind damage. Citizens Insurance of Florida, a non-profit, state-run company which takes on property owners who can’t get private coverage, has become Florida’s biggest insurer.

Even the oil and gas industry–which, of course, is a major contributor to climate change–is paying heed. Several years ago, IBM, a UK consulting firm called Acclimatise and the Carbon Disclosure Project published a report called Building Business Resilience to Inevitable Climate Change [PDF, download] urging oil-and gas companies to review their strategies, business models and supply chains to “check their resilience to the new risk landscape created by inevitable climate change.”

Environmental groups, which once focused solely on curbing carbon pollution, are now looking at adaptation, in part to underscore the urgency of the climate threat. Theo Spencer, a senior advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which helped organize a meeting early this month with utilities, insurance companies and others to talk about climate preparedness, says companies are coming to understand that “the weather is changing and we really need to do something about it.” He quotes the White House science adviser John Holdren who said the task ahead is not just “avoiding the unmanageable” but also  “managing the unavoidable.” Unavoidable climate change, and its consequences, is likely to be a corporate worry for years to come.

Happy New Year! And good riddance to 2011, a year during which we made little or no progress on some of the issues that I care most about: climate change, the long-term federal debt, social mobility (aka the American dream), and our dysfunctional Congress. Yet I remain an optimist.

Texas drought 2011

I could write many words about our woes. Instead, I’ll try to be succinct. On the climate issue, global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning jumped by the largest amount on record in 2010, we learned recently, and 2011 surely brought further increases.  Concentrations of CO₂ are 39% above where they were at the start of the industrial era and approaching the point when some scientists say it will be nearly impossible to contain global warming, the Guardian reports. Neither the US nor the UN moved closer to regulating CO2. In a discouraging development, Republicans Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich backed away from their once-sensible support of greenhouse gas regulation, in what can only be seen as shameless pandering to the know-nothing wing of the Republican Party. Discouraging, too, was the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which will slow down the growth of carbon-free nuclear power. So will the failure of Solyndra. Meanwhile, the U.S. suffered massive flooding of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, a terrible drought in Texas, record wildfires and at least 2,941 monthly weather records that were broken by extreme events, according to the NRDC.. Coincidence? Uh, no.

Like the atmospheric concentrations of CO2, the federal budget deficit has been growing.That’s no coincidence either. We’re living beyond our means, whether by burning fossil fuels or taxpayer dollars, and sticking future generations with the cleanup bill. Just last week, the White House asked for a $1.2 trillion increase in the federal debt limit, raising it to about $16.4 trillion. According to Marketplace Radio, that amounts to about $52,000 for every American. For a typical  family of four, that’s bigger than the mortgage.

Social mobility is harder to measure than income inequality (and more important, methinks), but indications are that it’s more difficult to climb the economic ladder in the U.S. than in other western democracies. The Economic Mobility Project, a  bipartisan effort to study the issue, reported recently on a study of 10 western nations that concluded: “In the United States, there is a stronger link between parental education and children’s economic, educational, and socio-emotional outcomes than in any other country investigated.” The sluggish U.S. economy in 2011 didn’t make life easier for those on the bottom who want to work hard and better themselves.

And yet.

As I wrote a year ago (see my blogpost, China, cappuccino and cell phones: reasons to cheer!),  life on this planet is getting better all the time. We humans are richer, healthier and and more peaceful than ever. It’s easiest to forget that, especially if you focus too much on the day-to-day headlines.

Here are several reasons to feel good about the year ahead:

Western economies are slumping, but the rest of the world is growing robustly. The most urgent problem facing mankind isn’t climate change: It’s the human misery that’s caused by poverty. There’s less of that today than there was a year ago, and there will be less on Jan 1, 2013, I’d bet. China’s GDP grew by about 10% in 2010 and by an estimated 9% in 2011. India grew by 6 to 7 percent last year.

A Nairobi street

Then there’s Africa. As Forbes reported last week, in the middle of the 2009 global economic recession, Africa was the only region apart from Asia that grew positively, at about 2%. The continent’s growth has been on an upward trajectory ever since then- 4.5% in 2010 and 5.0% in 2011.

Reliable statistics are hard to come by, but you can be sure that this means that many millions of people are living longer and healthier lives, and that their children have a better shot at an education. This is good  for all of us because the global economy is not a zero-sum game. An expanding pie means a safer world, and more markets for U.S. goods. And there’s even reason to hope believe that the US economy is due for a rebound. See what Matthew Yglesias writes in Slate that Happy Days Are Here Again.

Corporations are taking a more expansive view of their responsibilities: One reason why I write about business is that I believe that corporations can be a powerful force for good. Many are not, but I found reason in 2011 to applaud changes at Walmart (Have I Fallen in Love with Walmart?), McDonald’s (Mainstreaming Sustainability? ), Smithfield Foods (Sustainable pork?), Office Depot (No tree hugging, please), Shaw Carpets (This carpet has moral fiber), Unilever (CEO Paul Polman: Don’t stay on the sidelines), Starbucks (We are indivisible), Marks & Spencer (Sustainability, profits and a carbon-neutral bra),  TD Bank (America’s greenest bank?) and GE (How GE learned to think small and serve the poor). My most popular post of the year, by far, was about Patagonia (Maybe the best retail ad ever).

These companies are responding to rising expectations–from advocacy groups, consumers, a handful of shareholder activists and especially from their own workers. The changes they are making aren’t big enough, and they aren’t happening fast enough, but the forces driving companies to become more sustainable are getting stronger all the time.

Protesters in Egypt

Citizens’ movements are growing here and abroad. Whatever you think of Occupy Wall Street, they got one thing right–the deck is stacked in the US in favor of the well-to-do and the powerful, not just the 1% but the 10 or 20 or 30%, and it’s stacked against those at the bottom of the income ladder. So many laws and cultural practices that we take for granted–from the mortgage interest deduction to the dismal quality of the public education system in our big cities and poorest rural areas–serve the interests of the rich and powerful. Wall Street got bailed out. Main Street got left behind. Thank goodness for people didn’t take that lying down. Thanks, too, to the Tea Party, which is wrong about most things but right about the fact that the federal government can’t keep spending money that it doesn’t have.

Of course, Occupy Wall Street was largely inspired by citizens uprising in Tunisia and Egypt, which in turn seem to inspired people in Russia and even in China to demand more of a voice in their own affairs. This is all to the good, and it should be a reminder to those of us here in the U.S. not to take our freedoms for granted and to exercise our rights as citizens. A big job ahead is to convince Congress to act like adults and treat us that way, understanding that they were elected to solve big problems, even if that requires. We can’t have big government, generous services and low taxes. Or cheap energy without climate risk. Or affordable, unlimited health care for all.

Sure, there’s reason to be gloomy but it always helps to think long term. More people are free today than at any time in human history. More people live comfortably. We’re more tolerant and loving that we used to be. We’ve got an African American president and my daughter, who is gay, will get legally married in June. MLK Jr. had it right: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

Patagonia's home page this weekend

In the midst of the madness of black Friday, and this weekend of American consumerism run amok, come a few wise words from the outdoor retailer Patagonia.

In a full-page ad in the New York Times, the privately held company asks shoppers to think more carefully about what they purchase, and the real cost of all the things we buy.

The headline: Don’t Buy This Jacket

“We ask you to buy less and to reflect before you spend a dime on this jacket or anything else,” the company says.

The rest of the ad is worth reading, and thinking about, so I’ll copy the text here:

It’s Black Friday, the day in the year retail turns from red to black and starts to make real money. But Black Friday, and the culture of consumption it reflects, puts the economy of natural systems that support all life firmly in the red. We’re now using the resources of one-and-a-half planets on our one and only planet.

Because Patagonia wants to be in business for a good long time – and leave a world inhabitable for our kids – we want to do the opposite of every other business today. We ask you to buy less and to reflect before you spend a dime on this jacket or anything else.

Environmental bankruptcy, as with corporate bankruptcy, can happen very slowly, then all of a sudden. This is what we face unless we slow down, then reverse the damage. We’re running short on fresh water, topsoil, fisheries, wetlands – all our planet’s natural systems and resources that support business, and life, including our own.

The environmental cost of everything we make is astonishing. Consider the R2® Jacket shown, one of our best sellers. To make it required 135 liters of water, enough to meet the daily needs (three glasses a day) of 45 people. Its journey from its origin as 60% recycled polyester to our Reno warehouse generated nearly 20 pounds of carbon dioxide, 24 times the weight of the finished product. This jacket left behind, on its way to Reno, two-thirds its weight in waste.

And this is a 60% recycled polyester jacket, knit and sewn to a high standard; it is exceptionally durable, so you won’t have to replace it as often. And when it comes to the end of its useful life we’ll take it back to recycle into a product of equal value. But, as is true of all the things we can make and you can buy, this jacket comes with an environmental cost higher than its price.

There is much to be done and plenty for us all to do. Don’t buy what you don’t need. Think twice before you buy anything. Go to patagonia.com/CommonThreads or scan the QR code below. Take the Common Threads Initiative pledge, and join us in the fifth “R,” to reimagine a world where we take only what nature can replace.

That’s good environmental messaging. But is it good business for a company to urge people to buy less? Moreover, is there a disconnect between this ad and Patagonia’s own plans for grow, open new stores and mail out more catalogs?

Patagonia responds in a blogpost about the ad:

The test of our sincerity (or our hypocrisy) will be if everything we sell is useful, multifunctional where possible, long lasting, beautiful but not in thrall to fashion. We’re not yet entirely there. Not every product meets all these criteria. Our Common Threads Initiative will serve as a framework to advance us toward these goals.

Patagonia, to its credit, is pushing us (and its own people) to think about what sustainable consumption might look like. There’s nothing inherently wrong with buying stuff–without consumption, we’d have no jobs or economy–but our goal should be to buy stuff with the lowest possible environmental footprint, stuff that is produced and transported using renewable energy and stuff that, when it’s no longer useful or needed, can be turned into something else. Consumption, in other words, that is part of a zero-waste, zero-emissions economy.

It’s a long, long  way from here to there, but we need to start down that path down, and we  need visionary companies, as well as visionary environmentalists and politicians, to help us figure out how to get there. In an industry where lots of companies (notably Nike and REI) are thinking hard about sustainability, for obvious reasons–their business depends on the outdoors–Patagonia is leading the way.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to become a more responsible holiday shopper, check out the NRDC and its Green Gift Guide (plant a tree in Costa Rica, adopt a wolf in Yellowstone), which features some mildly amusing celebrity videos from people like Kyra Sedgwick and Tony Shalhoud on bad gifts.  Worth a look, too, is the Simplify the Holidays challenge from the invaluable Center for a New American Dream which suggests gifts of time or hand-made gifts.

In another bit of encouraging news, those Thanksgiving Day store openings that I blogged about last week [See my blogpost Thanksgiving Shopping Madness and especially the comments) have generated more than the usual backlash. Yesterday, the New York Times’ James Stewart did a terrific column about Anthony Hardwick, whose change.org petition challenged Target to give workers Thanksgiving Day off.

Then again, there was this:

At a Wal-Mart in Los Angeles, one woman seemed to take her position in line very seriously. Authorities said 20 people at a Wal-Mart store suffered minor injuries when a woman used pepper spray to gain a “competitive” shopping advantage shortly after the store opened on Thursday evening.

Ah, the spirit of the season.

Technological progress is impossible to predict, but it’s safe bet that we won’t be flying solar- or wind-powered airplanes anytime soon. So the best hope of flying without emitting large volumes of greenhouse gases lies with biofuels.

This week, there’s good news on bringing biofuels in the air. Beginning Wednesday, Alaska Airlines will fly 75 commercial passenger flights in the U.S. powered in part by biofuels. “This is a historic week for aviation,” declared Alaska Air’s CEO, Bill Ayer, in a press release. Today (Nov. 7), United Airlines make the first U.S. commercial flight using an advanced biofuel made from algae, according to Reuters.

Keith Loveless, vice president of corporate and legal affairs, who oversees sustainability, told me: “These fuels will make a meaningful contribution towards reducing the aviation industry’s environmental impact, and towards reducing fuel volatility, which is an incredible problem for the airline industry.”

But–and you knew there would be a but–biofuels remain way too expensive to replace jet fuels today. That’s why Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, got on the phone with me last week so that the Obama administration will do all it can to advance progress on aviation biofuels. “We are engaged right now in aggressively promoting research to determine the most efficient non-food feed crop that can be used,” he said.

Biofuels remain controversial, of course. The U.S. Senate, in a symbolic vote, overwhelming expressed support last summer for an end to massive corn ethanol subsidies, in what the NRDC’s Nathanael Greene called “a victory for taxpayers and the environment.”

But both the industry and environmentalists say that biofuels for aviation make sense. That’s because the only practical way to dramatically reduce CO2 emissions from planes (other than grounding them) is with biofuels. Plant-based jet fuels emits as much carbon pollution as traditional, petroleum-based jet fuel–indeed, they are chemically almost indistinguishable–growing new plants recaptures those CO2 emissions.

And airplanes matter. Aviation accounts for about  1.5 percent of global man-made GHG emissions per year, and gains in aircraft efficiency have been entirely offset by growing demand for air travel, according to the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

The industry supports biofuels for business as well as environmental reasons, Loveless told me. Creating an alternative to traditional get fuel will increase supply, drive down costs and reduce price volatility. “We are probably more affected by the price of fuel than any other industry,” he said.

“This will help create jobs in rural America,” Vilsack told me. “It should also save money for the airlines, which will reduce the cost of flying….and it’ll reduce our reliance on foreign oil.”

All true, but let’s remember there’s a long way to go before biofuels become mainstream. According to Loveless, Alaska Air will pay about $17 per gallon for a biofuel made from discarded cooking oil that will replace 20% of the jet fuel on the 75 flights, between Seattle and Washington, D.C., and Seattle and Portland, Oregon. Despite that boost in cost, the environmental benefits of a 20% blend will be modest, according to the airline:

Alaska Air Group estimates the 20 percent certified biofuel blend it is using for the 75 flights will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 10 percent, or 134 metric tons, the equivalent of taking 26 cars off the road for a year.

The company also said:

The fuel was supplied by SkyNRG, an aviation biofuels broker, and made by Dynamic Fuels, a producer of next-generation renewable, synthetic fuels made from used cooking oil. The synthetic high-performance airliner fuel made by Dynamic Fuels — a $170 million joint-venture between Tyson Foods Inc. (NYSE: TSN) and Syntroleum Corp. (NASDAQ: SYNM) — meets aviation and military safety, sustainability and performance standards.

United Airlines, meanwhile, is using biofuels to power a flight from Houston (oil country!) to Chicago. According to Biofuels Digest, the fuel produced by Solazyme is a 40/60 blend of sustainable biofuel and traditional petroleum-derived jet fuel. (See my 2010 blogpost, Gee whiz algae! for more on Solazyme.)

To speed adoption of biofuels, Vilsack and the ag department this fall announced a $136 million research program of grants to universities in Washington, Iowa, Louisiana and Tennessee to develop next-generation biofuels from such feedstocks as switchgrass, woody biomass and sugarcane. Separately, the ag department, energy department and the navy have plans to invest up to $510 million in partnership with industry to produce advanced, drop-in biofuels to power military and commercial planes and ships.

Said Vilsack:  “We may have to provide some encouragement [meaning money] at the beginning, until the market becomes a mature market.”

–

Two updates: I emailed Jonathan Wolfson, the CEO of Solazyme, to ask him what feedstock was used for the United flight, as well as the cost of the biofuel. He replied that it was made from domestic sugarcane and wrote:

Solazyme sold the fuel to United at current aviation fuel prices. We announced at our IPO in May of this year that we achieved the key performance metrics that we believe would allow us to manufacture oils today at a cost below $1,000 per metric ton ($3.44 per gallon or $0.91 per liter) if produced in a built-for-purpose commercial plant.

I also had an email from a PR woman from Honeywell UOP saying that “the algal oil, provided by Solazyme, was refined into biofuel using process technology from Honeywell’s UOP.”  Here’s more from Honeywell.

Peter Lehner

“Americans actually do care about their health. They don’t want their kids have to be poisoned in order for them to get a job. They value their natural heritage.”

“One should not read what’s going on the House of Representatives as an indication of where America wants to be.”

That’s Peter Lehner talking. Peter, a 52-year-old environmental lawyer, is executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of America’s most important environmental groups. The NRDC has a $95 million budget, about 400 employees and about 1.3 million members. They’re big and they represent a lot of people.

And yet the NRDC and its allies are getting nowhere in Washington.

They’re struggling to protect the EPA against unrelenting Republican attacks.

And, as Elizabeth Rosenthal wrote the other day in the Times, climate change–arguably the biggest problem facing mankind–has devolved into a non-issue. The “fading of global warming from the political agenda is a mostly American phenomenon,” she wrote.

Why?

That was the question on my mind when I met recently with Peter, who is thoughtful and smart, to talk about the politics of climate. That’s not my  specialty, but I came with an idea: The green groups that try to persuade Americans that environmental protection is good for their jobs and pocketbooks–that is, that green is in our self-interest–have missed opportunities to frame the environment and especially climate as moral issues, in ways that would appeal to our higher and better selves. Put another way, the big NGOs that focus on policy are not as comfortable talking about culture and religion.

So I wondered what the NRDC had learned from the failure of cap-and-trade—the scheme to regulate greenhouse gas emissions that was rejected by Congress—and whether its leaders are rethinking their message.

As best as I can tell from Peter, the answer is no or at least not yet, anyway.

He offered several explanations for the defeat of cap-and-trade, most of them familiar and arguably true. Enviros were outspent by polluters, he said, who succeeded in re-branding the Waxman-Markey legislation passed by the house as a “job-killing energy tax.” (According to the Center for the American Progress Action Fund, “Big Oil, Dirty Coal, and other special interests like the American Petroleum Institute combined spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying lawmakers and filling their campaign coffers.”) It’s very difficult to pass major legislation of any kind during an economic downturn, and few complex and sweeping pieces of legislation are enacted on their first go-around. (Although cap-and-trade has been talked about in Congress.) Maybe cap-and-trade was too complicated; maybe a tax on carbon pollution, with the money rebated to people, would be simpler.

“If you look at history,” Peter said, “the fact that we didn’t get this big bill through in the face of enormous amounts of money, during a recession and on the first try should not be a surprise.”

So what now? Build bridges, he says: “To take on strong interests, we need a broad alliance of voices.” Public health groups and parents can be enlisted to talk about the health effects of pollution. National security and military people can talk about imported oil. Business leaders can talk about the clean energy economy.

“The environmentalists can’t carry this ball by ourselves,” he says. Again, this is true enough, but those groups were enlisted as allies during the 2009-2010 debate. The trouble is, none worked very hard.

Time may be the green groups’ best ally. “Eventually, reality will win,” Peter said. “Those who claim the climate isn’t change are eventually going to be seen as ostriches with their head in the sand.” What’s more, as businesses and consumers save money with energy efficiency and adopt clean energy, they will see that “you can actually have a better life through a lot of the solutions we are talking about.” Again, this makes sense, but time is short. And, while some people may get excited by the smart grid or solar rooftops, others don’t want transmission lines or wind farms in their neighborhood.

It’s easy for policy-oriented organizations like the NRDC to forget that we’re driven by emotion as well as logic–and that there’s nothing wrong with that. Some people get involved with environmental issues because they want to leave their children a better future. Others do so because they love the outdoors and don’t want to see it trashed. Those with a strong sense of fairness are troubled when polluters cause harm,  and not held accountable.

Protecting the earth is fundamentally a moral issue, I suggested to Peter, and perhaps environmentalists should do more to enlist religious allies. Of course, he agreed.

“I would hope that the faith voices would make it a more important issue,” he said. “Some are.”

Yes, some are. [See Interfaith Power and Light, the Evangelical Environmental Network, and COEJL, a Jewish environmental group.] But not enough.

When our conversation ended, I gave Peter a book called Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves by Adam Hochschild. It’s a riveting account of the British movement to end slavery, which was the world’s first grass-roots movement. The parallels to the environmental movement are at best imperfect – abolitionists did not have to contend with Exxon Mobil or Fox News – but the 19^th century global economy as dependent on slavery as today’s economy is reliant on fossil fuels. (And, while people will have to pay more for electricity if dirty coal gives way to solar and wind power, our ancestors presumably absorbed rising prices when slaves were replaced by workers who were paid for their labor.) The anti-slavery movement was at its heart a moral and religious crusade. So, of course, was the 1960s civil rights movement.

Environmentalists today desperately need a movement, and while you can find the beginnings of one if you look—see 350.org or Tar Sands Action or maybe even OccupyWallStreet—it’s hard to build a movement without religious voices.

350.org in San Francisco

Our national conversation has become so politicized that it’s hard to talk about anything without setting off an argument.

Not the weather. And certainly not the failure of Solyndra, the solar company that went bankrupt after getting a $535 million loan from the Obama administration.

Today’s hearing of the  Republican-led House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, focusing in part on Solyndra, was more like an inquisition than a fact-finding exercise.

It was titled “How Obama’s Green Energy Agenda is Killing Jobs.” That was before the testimony began.

No matter that chief inquisitor Darrell Issa, who now denounces clean energy subsidies, once sought a loan guarantee for Aptera, an electric car maker that wanted to set up shop in his district. Dan Burton, the No. 2 Republican on the panel, supported a federal guarantee for Abound Solar, a company in his district.

What hypocrisy.

Democrats are little better, particularly as they blather on about green jobs. Sure,  when Washington subsidizes clean energy, jobs may be created. The thing is, when the government subsidize anything (oil exploration, ethanol, high fructose corn syrup, home ownership), you get more of it, and more jobs. Does this mean that market-distorting subsidies are an efficient way to create jobs? The question answers itself.

[By the way, there was some amusing back-and-forth at the hearing about what constitutes a green job. It turns out that bus drivers, whether driving they are driving hybrid buses  or not, are doing "green jobs" because mass transport is greener than driving,  my friend Matthew Wald reports in The Times.]

So what, if anything, can we learn from Solyndra’s failure? Should the government stop financing clean energy, as some Republicans say? Or preserve today’s subsidies, as the industry would like?

To put the Solyndra story in context, I listened to a call today with two solar industry veterans, Dan Shugar, the CEO of Solaria and Arno Harris, the CEO of Recurrent Energy. Neither company, for the record, has received direct loan guarantees from the energy department (and I know from my past dealings with him that Shugar’s a straight shooter).

First, Solyndra’s failure does not mean there’s anything wrong with the solar business. Just the opposite.

“Contrary to all the chatter out there, solar’s here, solar’s ready, solar’s booming,” said Harris. The Solar Energy Industries Association reported this week that the solar PV market grew by 69 percent during the second quarter of 2011, compared to Q2 of 2010. The group said:

The U.S. remains poised to install 1,750 megawatts of PV in 2011, double last year’s total and enough to power 350,000 homes.

The industry employs about 100,000 people. “Solar employs more Americans than coal mining or iron and steel manufacturing,” Harris noted. Then again, Walmart employs 1.4 million people in the U.S.

Second, Solyndra failed because it couldn’t compete. The costs of solar panels are dropping, which is a good thing, but not for Solyndra, whose panels were pricey.

Shugar said the costs of solar panels have dropped from about $6 a watt in the mid-1980s to about $1.25 per watt today. “The cost of solar has dropped ferociously,” he said.

Costs continue to fall. As the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory recently reported, the price of solar installation dropped 17% from 2009 to 2010, and another 11% in the first half of 2011.

Third, Solyndra and the rest of the solar industry remain entirely dependent on subsidies. Solyndra got the now-famous loan guarantee. Its customers enjoyed the 30% investment tax credit. What’s more, because more than half the states in the U.S. have renewable portfolio standards, requiring utilities to include renewable energy in their mix, solar often doesn’t have to compete with coal or natural gas but with other forms of renewable energy, principally wind; the utilities can pass the higher costs of solar onto their ratepayers. [See my 2010 blogpost, The Hidden Costs of Solar Power, written after I visited Solyndra.

Republicans are threatening to repeal the 30% tax credit. “That would be a terrible tragedy,” Harris said. “It would put at risk the momentum this industry has created.”

Interestingly, Shugar and Harris both said they would be willing to give up or sharply reduce the 30% tax credit as the costs of solar continue to fall, so long as subsidies for competing technologies (nuclear power, natural gas and coal) were eliminated, too.

“Solar is going to reach the point where it can be competitive without the investment tax credit in five years or so,” Harris said. Shugar agreed, saying: “We can certainly talk about removing all subsidies. Over the longer term, definitely, solar can stand on its own.”

In the meantime, the single best argument for clean energy subsidies is not “green competes” or economic competitiveness with China but the fact that fossil fuels enjoy an unfair advantage over solar and wind: They don’t have to pay the costs of emitting carbon pollutants, which are  leading to catastrophic climate change. Taxing or regulating CO2 emissions would be better, simpler and more efficient subsidizing clean energy, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

Unfortunately, the incentive tax credit is an imperfect and wasteful subsidy because it’s cost-based. If I spend $30,000 to put solar panels on my house, which is shaded by big trees in Bethesda, MD, and my contractor overcharges me, I get the same tax break as an Arizona homeowner who spends $30,000 wisely and generates more environmental benefit. That’s wrong. There should be a way to subsidize clean energy based on its performance, as the NRDC’s David Goldstein argues here.

More important, though, I’m persuaded by the Solyndra story that there’s no compelling reason for the government to provide loans, grants, tax breaks or favors to individual companies, no matter how worthy they may appear to be.

Picking out promising technologies and management teams is a job best left toventure capitalists, whose success rate, by the way, is not especially high.

For a lot of reasons–the temptation to play political favorites, the risk of outright corruption, the fact that worthy companies can raise money in private markets–it’s not a job best done by experts at the U.S. Department of Energy.

Particularly because they’re betting  with other people’s money.

So we already knew that watching too much TV dulls the mind and costs a bundle (my cable bill’s $170 a month, including Internet and phone).

Now we know, thanks to a new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council, that your super-snazzy set-top box and DVR combo that means you will never have to miss another episode of Two Men and a Baby is costing you more money, wasting energy and generating carbon emissions.

With more than 80% of Americans now subscribing to cable, the numbers, taken as a whole, grow pretty big, the NRDC says:

In 2010, the electricity required to operate all U.S. set-top boxes was equal to the annual household electricity consumption of the entire state of Maryland, resulted in 16 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, and cost households more than $3 billion.

They aren’t as startling on a house-by-house basis–each box, on average, costs about $18.75 a year to operate, depending on local electricity prices.  But much of that money, it turns out, is wasted. About two-thirds of the energy consumed by the set-top is used when no one is watching TV or recording programs.

In a press release, NRDC’s efficiency guru, Noah Horowitz, says:

Set-top boxes are the ultimate home energy vampires, silently sucking significant amounts of energy and money when nobody’s using them. The consumer, who pays the electric bill, deserves technologies without hidden costs.

On his blog, Noah goes on to say:

The biggest finding from our field work was that the only way to really turn these boxes off is to unplug them — not an attractive option. For almost all the boxes we tested, hitting the power button simply dims the clock or display. For a typical DVR, instead of consuming 30 Watts when on, the box used 29 Watts, only the difference of one Watt.

The problem here, as it is with many wasteful practices in the economy, is a split incentive between the owner and the user. (Economists call this a principle-agent problem.) It’s the reason why a landlord doesn’t care how inefficient an air conditioner is if the tenant pays the bill, and why few people dining out on an open-ended expense account pay much attention to the bill. In this case, the  cable operator (Comcast, Time Warner) or phone company (Verizon, AT&T) that buys the set-top box doesn’t pay the electric bill, and so they have no reason to design, build, buy or demand a more efficient box. Markets aren’t working the way they should.

To put this into perspective, here’s a chart from NRDC:

So what’s to be done? Ideally, align the incentives to drive efficiency. By email, Noah told me that “NRDC is working with local utilities to explore the possibility of providing rebates to the service providers” — i.e., the cable and phone companies — who deploy set-top boxes that meet the highest standard, Energy Star 4.0.  Utilities are interesting in efficiency, at least in deregulated markets, because it saves them the expense of building new power plants. NRDC also wants to “engage with set-top box manufacturers,” he said. For their part, consumers can request an Energy Star 4.0 box.

I emailed Motorola Mobility, a major manufacturer of set-top boxes (and a leading maker of environmentally-friendly phones) for comment. A spokesman replied by email:

Motorola Mobility has developed low-power modes for our latest line of set-tops, bringing significant energy reductions. We have set a requirement for all new designs of our set-tops for the U.S. market to meet the latest U.S. EPA’s ENERGY STAR standard.

About 10% of Verizon’s boxes meet Energy Star criteria, the company’s sustainability officer, James Gowen, told USA Today. Newer boxes are more energy efficient, he said.

So it sounds like the industry is moving in the right direction.

Noah Horowitz described the challenge ahead like this:

What the industry really needs to figure out is how to provide dramatic energy savings when a box is not actively in use, while preserving the ability to refresh quickly when the user returns. The ideal model, of course, are cell phones, which are always able to receive a call or email (and) use very little power in standby mode.

Here’s an even more radical idea. Cut cable altogether. You’ll spend more time with your family, read more books, get outside and save money. I’m not there yet, unfortunately, but as soon as I can watch  big league baseball (including my hometown Nationals) and ESPN on my iPad, I’ll cut the cord myself.

[Photo credit: Taken 19 January 2007 in Osage County, Kansas by Barbara Reyes}

Today’s guest column comes from Amanda Little (née Griscom), one of my favorite writers on energy and the environment, and it’s on a very timely topic–the greening of sports. Amanda is the  author of Power Trip: The Story of America’s Love Affair With Energy, and she was a long-time columnist for Grist.org and Salon.com. Amanda has also written for Outside, the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Wired, New York, InStyle, O Magazine and the Washington Post. She is the recipient of the Jane Bagley Lehman Award for excellence in environmental journalism. Amanda’s now blogging for Forbes.com, where this column originally appeared.

Why is it timely? Because just the other day, the Philadelphia Eagles unveiled plans to install solar panels, wind turbines and a co-generation plant at Lincoln Financial Field, making the stadium quite possibly the “greenest” in the sports. The gridiron goes off the grid, you could say. And if you think sports is a sandbox, with little impact on the “real world,” think again, about, say, Jackie Robinson’s influence on the civil rights movement. If you want to change the minds of people at the grass roots, about climate or energy or recycling, there’s no better place to start than with sports.

As the San Francisco Giants celebrate their 2010 World Series triumph, they’re quietly coveting another, humbler feat—one that’s perhaps no less historic in the long run. The Giants are one of the greenest teams in professional sports, and they’re proving that sustainable practices fatten the bottom line even as they ease the burdens on the planet.

Their stadium, AT&T Park, which accommodates about 45,000 fans, runs its scoreboard on solar power, recycles and composts nearly 50 percent of its waste, sources eco-friendly napkins, containers, utensils, toilet paper and the like, and has enough efficiency features to cut the stadium’s annual energy and water bills in half. That amounts to huge savings, given that stadiums can consume as much energy as small cities.

AT&T Park: Green in more ways than one

The Giants are on the front end of a trend that’s quickly gaining traction in major league baseball and throughout the NFL and NBA. Teams are stepping up recycling and efficiency in their facilities, attracting lucrative corporate sponsorships with green messaging, and raising consciousness among fans. If the trend continues to build in the next two years, we may find that games do more to push environmental progress in the U.S. than politics.

Especially now, given the acrimony in Washington, professional sports may have a broader and more profound influence than any other single entity on American mindsets, slicing through socioeconomic and political divides. “More than 150 million Americans – half our population – regularly follow professional sports,” Allen Hershkowitz, Senior Scientist at Natural Resources Defense Council, told me. Hershkowitz founded the NRDC project greensports.org, a pro-bono consultancy that advises teams and leagues on environmental strategies.

For nearly a century, professional sports have galvanized social movements and ginned up American patriotism. Baseball, for instance, desegregated a decade before the nation did, helping catalyze the civil rights movement. Women’s basketball and softball leagues were organized before women had the right to vote.

Today environmental advocacy is getting big play in ballparks, even though it’s facing backlash in the Beltway. During the playoffs and throughout the World Series, Robert Redford loomed large on Jumbotrons. “The coming decade may be our last chance to head off environmental crises like global warming,” he intoned between innings in a PSA for NRDC. “We can choose a different future. But we’ve got to do it quickly. And each of us must play a part.”

Team executives, for their part, seem interested less in the ethics of sustainability than in the economics.

“I’m not going to try and convince you that it’s all about altruism,” Jason Pearl, the Giants’ Managing Vice President of Corporate Sponsorship and New Business Development, told me. “This is very clearly a benefit to our bottom line.” The net positive isn’t just the savings on energy, water and waste disposal, which will more than pay off the initial investment in efficiency measures. Pearl can leverage the Giants’ greening strategies to grow existing sponsorships and attract new ones.

PG&E (NYSE: PCG), the utility that supplies power to two thirds of California, worked with the Giants to retrofit their stadium, and then built a significant branding campaign around that effort. “They see us as a platform to execute their energy-efficient programming,” said Pearl. “At the same time, our fans are a great audience for advertising that effort.”

The Giants have also lured or expanded green sponsorship deals with Canadian Solar (NASDAQ: CSIQ), LINC Corporation (which provides heating and air conditioning) and Centerplate (a hospitality company that provides food to sports stadiums). It’s a virtuous circle: “We’ve been able to use green sponsorship dollars to drive opportunities that, in turn, attract more sponsorship dollars.”

It might seem obvious to pursue this sort of strategy in a market like San Francisco, which has an exceptionally high Birkenstocks-per-citizen ratio. But similar stories of green branding success are emerging among teams in Atlanta, Boston, and other not-so-obviously green markets.

The Boston Red Sox, which has begun converting its 100-year-old Fenway Park into a green stadium, has built green sponsorship campaigns with Waste Management (NYSE: WM), National Grid (NYSE: NGG), and Poland Spring. “Poland had a bull’s eye on them in terms of the plastic bottles backlash,” said Troup Parkinson, the team’s Vice President of Client Services, “so they came to us with a proposal to do a major recycling campaign at the park. It was a win-win — two forward-thinking brands working together.”

Recycling at Atlanta's Turner Field

The Atlanta Braves, a team that has cut its energy bills by $350,000 a year with stadium retrofits, built a similar green partnership with The Coca-Cola Company (NYSE: KO). The company placed giant recycling receptacles shaped like Coke bottles throughout Turner Field to collect the tens of thousands of PET bottles that are thrown away at each event; Coca-Cola then recycles those bottles into a synthetic fabric used to make the uniforms for 2000 stadium staffers. These uniforms, bearing the dual logos of Coca-Cola and the Braves, also display a number indicating how many recycled bottles it took to manufacture the garment. The program has generated so much buzz among Braves fans that the team and Coca-Cola are discussing a merchandise line made from the stadium’s recycled bottles.

The list of green sponsorships extends well beyond baseball. In the NFL, the Philadelphia Eagles built a state-of-the-art green stadium that has saved more than $5 million in energy bills since 2005. The team also decided to source green products from its suppliers, and when its longtime partner Kimberly-Clark didn’t come up with the right offerings, the Eagles switched to SCA-Tork, maker of napkins, bathroom tissue and other paper products. Not only does Tork now provide stadium supplies, it has signed on to a seven-figure sponsorship deal to advertise these efforts.

In the NBA, several teams including the Utah Jazz, the Portland Trailblazers and the Phoenix Suns are developing green facilities and, in turn, have forged green marketing campaigns with sponsors ranging from Orbit sprinkling systems to Allied Waste. Some teams are also offering green incentives for fans such as ticket discounts for those who travel to the game via public transit.

The twin benefits of energy savings and sponsorships are good news in an industry that has been suffering from low ticket sales. Last year, major league baseball sold 1 million fewer tickets league-wide than it did in pre-recession 2007. The NFL and NBA have also seen sharp drops in their ticket revenues due to strained household budgets.

With this in mind, the greening trend in professional sports makes good sense—why wouldn’t a team want to cut its energy bills and seek alternative revenue streams during an economic downturn? As for potential sponsors — what company these days doesn’t want to green its image – whether it’s selling corn chips or cars?

And yet, for every green sporting stadium that’s being built, there are two more that are going in the opposite direction. The new Dallas Cowboy’s stadium, for instance, is an energy-guzzling Colossus averaging $200,000 in monthly utility bills and consuming about as much power as Santa Monica, California. (A conventional scoreboard, on its own, can devour as much electricity annually as 100 homes.)

There’s certainly a long way for professional sports to go—only a small percentage of teams have joined the greening trend. And the strategies that have been pursued so far have glaring blind spots, such as fuel use. Professional sports teams have extensive travel schedules, covering as many as 34,000 miles in a season. Nothing’s being done to trim this down.

I asked representatives of the NFL, NBA and MLB if their commissioners might consider mandating league-wide energy-efficiency practices: Could teams be required to cut the energy demands of their stadiums, just as they’ve been exhorted to participate in league-wide campaigns to fundraise for cancer research and fight childhood obesity? Could divisions be restructured so that teams play neighboring teams within set regions for most of the season, as they did long ago, slashing travel miles, in turn? All responded, in so many words, No.

At a time of federal paralysis on energy and climate legislation, our push for progress must happen from the ground up, in our schools, churches, cities, states—and sports teams.

Let’s applaud the teams that are greening professional sports. Let’s also ask them to do more, and demand similar practices from those that have yet to join the movement. The reality is, we’re not getting positive environmental action from our elected leaders, but we might be able to get it from our players. For now, anyway, they’re more popular than our politicians—and perhaps more influential.

If you like the BP oil spill…

you’re going to love carbon capture and storage.

Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is the technology that offers the best hope of generating electricity from coal in a way that doesn’t further heat up the planet. When people talk about “clean coal” – a phrase that deserves quotes because coal is never entirely clean — they’re often talking about CCS.

CCS technologies, which can be applied before or after the coal is burned, are designed to capture carbon dioxide, transport it to a secure location, typically deep under the ground, and then sequester it safely for a long, long time, with little or no risk that it will ever escape.

Get the connection? Just as the oil industry assures that they can safely drill for oil a mile under the ocean, the coal companies and utility industry are very confident that can bury CO2 deep under the ground, with little or no risk that it will ever escape.

Do you want to take them at their word?

I asked Mike Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club and a leading anti-coal activist, about BP and CCS. He replied by email:

The BP deep water oil disaster is an example of how seeking out new and riskier ways of feeding our addiction to fossil fuels leads to new and more catastrophic problems….If there’s a lesson in this, it’s that relying on unproven and complicated methods to sustain our dependence on oil and coal has disastrous consequences.

You may be surprised to learn that CCS isn’t favored just by the coal guys or the utilities. Some environmental groups like the technology, too. David Hawkins, the estimable head of the climate program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which strongly opposes conventional coal plants, says it’s essential that we figure out CCS. Here’s his very thoughtful argument on behalf of CCS, from NRDC’s Switchboard blog:

As a community, we have achieved great success in blocking new coal plants one by one but we need a comprehensive coal policy as well.  Showing CCS is an available tool helps us to convince policymakers that they should oppose construction of coal plants that do not capture their carbon.  Is such a policy as attractive to many in our community as a law that says no more coal plants, period? No.  But we need to ask ourselves — what are the realistic odds of getting Congress or any significant coal-using state to adopt a “no new coal, period” policy in the next handful of years?   I have fought the coal industry for 40 years and in my judgment the odds of a total ban on new coal plants are not large.

The Obama administration is also an enthusiastic supporter of CCS on a grand scale, in the form of a controversial, costly project known as Future Gen. Just a week ago, even as oil was spewing into the gulf, Obama’s DOE  announced that it would spend up to $612 million in recovery act money (to be matched by $368 million in private funding) to demonstrate large-scale CCS from industrial sources (not power plants, although the technology is similar).

One project will store CO2 in a “deep saline formation,” as part of a corn ethanol project. Two others will use the CO2 in “enhanced oil recovery” in the Gulf, believe it or not. Such well-connected companies as Archer Daniels Midland and GE are among the beneficiaries. From the DOE announcement:

·         Leucadia Energy, LLC (Lake Charles, LA)—Leucadia and Denbury Onshore LLC will capture and sequester 4.5 million tons of CO2 per year from a new methanol plant in Lake Charles, LA. The CO2 will be delivered via a 12-mile connector pipeline to an existing Denbury interstate CO2 pipeline and sequestered via use for enhanced oil recovery in the West Hastings oilfield, starting in April 2014. The project team includes Leucadia Energy, Denbury, General Electric, Haldor Topsoe, Black & Veatch, Turner Industries, and the University of Texas Bureau of Economic Geology.  (DOE share: $260 million)

·         Air Products & Chemicals, Inc. (Port Arthur, TX)—Air Products will partner with Denbury Onshore LLC to capture and sequester one million tons of CO2 per year from existing steam-methane reformers in Port Arthur, Texas, starting in November 2012. The CO2 will be delivered via a 12-mile connector pipeline to an existing Denbury interstate CO2 pipeline and sequestered via use for enhanced oil recovery in the West Hastings oilfield. The project team includes Air Products & Chemicals, Denbury Onshore LLC, the University of Texas Bureau of Economic Geology, and Valero Energy Corporation.  (DOE share: $253 million)

·         Archer Daniels Midland Corporation (Decatur, Ill.)—The project will capture and sequester one million tons of CO2 per year from an existing ethanol plant in Illinois, starting in August 2012. The CO2 will be sequestered in the Mt. Simon Sandstone, a well-characterized saline reservoir located about one mile from the plant. The project team includes Archer Daniels Midland, Schlumberger Carbon Services, and the Illinois State Geological Survey. (DOE share: $99 million)

Unfortunately, these subsidies don’t appear to be linked to actual tons of carbon sequestered. They support demonstration projects. Still to be determined are such issues as who “owns” the store CO2, who will be responsible, financially, if it escapes, etc.  To be fair, CO2 has been stored underground for years as part of enhanced oil recovery, but we’ve also been doing deepwater drilling for a long time.

Interestingly, the connection between the BP disaster and CCS was suggested to me,  not by an environmentalist, but by a very sophisticated investor in clean technology. This investor—who asked not to be identified, because he works closely with big companies like GE and with the Obama team—has placed bets on solar power, energy storage and efficiency, so he’s no fan of coal, but he’s also driven by a personal passion around the climate crisis.

Since I can’t quote the investor, I’ll give the last work to the Sierra Club’s Mike Brune:

Relying on carbon capture and storage is like a heroin addict finding a new vein to shoot. It’s not a solution, it’s simply a new way to perpetuate the problem. The Sierra Club has no objection to using private, corporate resources to fund CCS research to see if CCS can ever be done safely, cheaply, and without requiring massive amounts of energy. In the meantime, we shouldn’t be seeking out more expensive and dangerous ways to feed our dependence on oil or coal. Instead, we should be putting our innovation and resources to work in the service of clean energy that will create jobs and keep our coasts, wild places, and communities healthy and intact.

Photo links/credits: duck (Audubon Society of Florida)  coal plant (wikimedia)

Somehow Americans manage to turn every holiday—from Christmas to Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, the 4^th of July, Veterans Day, Memorial Day, so-called President’s Day and the rest —into a shopping opportunity.

Perversely, this is now happening to Earth Day, as companies try to persuade us that we can  shop our way to a cleaner, greener planet.

Crazy, isn’t it? Along with coal plants, gas-guzzling SUVs and climate deniers, the American way of producing and consuming and discarding, buying lots of stuff we don’t need that isn’t going to make us happy anyway is, not to put too fine a point on it, trashing the only planet we have.

This is not what the first Earth Day–40 years ago, in 1970—was all about. It was a political event. It was about building an environmental movement. It was led by young people and scientists and counter-culture types and it arrived at a time when support was building for other political and social movements as well—the opposition to the Vietnam War, the feminist movement and the gay rights movement, all of which were inspired by the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s.

None of these were mainstream, at least not at first. None were about shopping.

Earth Day led to the environmental laws of the early 1970s, which brought real and dramatic change: Our air and water are cleaner, parks and wilderness have been conserved, species have been protected.

Today, Earth Day is mainstream. An recent MBA grad I know says that’s a good thing. She told me by email:

I think it’s generally good if green is mainstream as more companies are offering environmental products.  That way we Berkeley types aren’t the only crazy ones!

I’m not so sure. Buying a T-shirt or tote bag won’t curb climate change or protect endangered habitat. That takes politics, organizing, hard work.

Here are some of the Earth Day products that have been brought to my attention  in the days leading up to the 40th anniversary. These are bhappybags — I’m not making this up — and they are described as an “attractive yet durable line of reusable shopping/tote, wine, yoga and dry-cleaning bags” that  “help to eliminate the destructive overuse of disposable bags.”

This is a shower curtain made from natural hemp fabric that, I’m told, “does not require a plastic or vinyl liner, thus eliminating the concerns for toxic off gasing.  When it’s dirty, just throw it in the washing machine.” Available from Dream Designs.

And there is this “only all-natural, whole-kernel corn litter that is biodegradable and renewable, flushable, septic safe and chemical free (no synthetic chemicals, clays or perfumes),” sold by World’s Best Cat Litter.

There’s more, much more, alas.

Fortunately, not all companies see Earth Day as just another revenue driver. Starbucks, as an example, did something smart and meaningful  last week. It gave away a free cup of coffee to everyone who brought in a re-usable mug, using social media, including this entertaining video, to promote the event. This may be about branding but it’s  true to the spirit of Earth Day, a reminder to people that you don’t need that iconic white-and-green cup, which is going to find its way into the trash, to enjoy your morning brew. Nor is this a one time event. Starbucks has also made public commitments to serve more of its coffee in reusable mugs and making the cup recyclable.

Major league baseball is also taking Earth Day seriously. Teams are hosting Earth Day events to promote recycling, energy efficiency and conservation. The Phillies are recycling cell phones and buying renewable energy, the Indians are giving away caps made out of recycled plastic bottles, and my Washington Nationals are discounting tickets for fans who take metro, as opposed to driving to the game. Good stuff.

More important, big league baseball has agreed to begin collecting environmental data at all 30 stadiums about energy use, waste generation, water use and paper procurement, and then share best practices among the teams. You can read more about it from Allen Hershkowitz of NRDC, who calls this “arguably, the most important environmental initiative in the history of professional sports, worldwide.”

So you can see that I’m not opposed to companies capitalizing on Earth Day to promote themselves, provided they are pushing for change–as opposed to selling us T-shirts, tote bags and mugs that we probably don’t need.