Robin Carey

Next steps: Climate action and green business

January 25, 2010

Under the category of shameless promotion of self and friends, I want to call your attention to three upcoming events where I’ll be asking questions of some very smart people.

Tomorrow (Tuesday, January 26), I will be moderating a webinar for my colleagues at The Energy Collective called Is Global Action on Climate Change a Pipe Dream? Breaking Down What Was (Or Wasn’t) Achieved at COP15.

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Next Thursday, February 4, I’ll be in San Francisco to join my colleagues at Greenbiz.com, led by executive editor Joel Makower, at their annual State of Green Business Forum at the PG&E Auditorium.

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The following Tuesday, February 9, Joel and I and the Greenbiz crew will reconvene for a State of Green Business Forum at the Chicago Mart Plaza.

Here are some details:

We’ve got a great panel for The Energy Collective webinar, which is free of charge. Robert Stavins, the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government at the Kennedy School at Harvard, as well as director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program. Prior to Harvard, Stavins was a staff economist at the Environmental Defense Fund. You can read one of his thoughtful blogposts about Copenhagen here. Aimée Christensen is an activist and consultant who’s worked in government, business, law and the nonprofit world on climate, human rights and development issues. She’s now got her own company, Christensen Global Strategies, which advises corporate, governmental,  and non-profit clients seeking to address the global challenges of climate change, ecosystem degradation, and resource scarcity. Her clients have included the Clinton Global Initiative,  Swiss Re, the United Nations Development Program, Virgin United, and Wolfensohn + Co.  Our third panelist will be Dirk Forrister, managing director at Natsource, a leading carbon finance company. Dirk previously worked for the Clinton White House and the Department of Energy, so he knows the Washington scene.  We’ll begin our conversation at 1 p.m. ET, and allow plenty of time for questions from the audience. You can register for the event here.

In San Francisco and Chicago, after Joel Makower and Greenbiz release their annual State of Green Business report, we’ll spend the day talking about where green business is going with an impressive array of business leaders. In San Francisco, they will include Carl Bass, the president and CEO of Autodesk, Rob Bernard, chief environmental strategist for Microsoft, entrepreneur and MacArthur fellow Saul Griffith, Rich Lechner, v.p. of energy and environment at IBM,  Rick Rommel, who leaders emerging businesses for Best Buy and Kevin Surace, CEO of Serious Materials. (Van Jones, the former White House green jobs czar, is also on the SF agenda, but he will be appearing by telepresence from Washington, D.C.) In Chicago, we will be joined by David Baum, president of the Baum Realty Group, Jim Davis, executive director for sustainability at SAP, Donna Ducharme of the Delta Institute, Rich Lechner, Sonia Medina, U.S. country director for EcoSecurities, C. David Myers, president for building efficiency at Johnson Controls, and Richard L. Sandor, chairman and founder of the Chicago Climate Exchange, among others. To register for either event, or obtain further info, visit the State of Green Business website. We’ll be talking about these topics:

Carbon Management After Copenhagen: How are companies considering carbon now that the Copenhagen summit is behind us? Hear how companies are viewing carbon as a strategic issue, implementing sophisticated new accounting schemes, realigning their products and processes, and preparing to compete in a low-carbon economy.

Green Marketing in the Age of Radical Transparency: In a world in which vast amounts of information are available about companies and products, the rules of green marketing have changed. Today, companies must respond to green ratings and rankings from websites, media companies, nonprofit organizations, and big players like Walmart. In a world where consumers have unparalleled access to data about products and companies, how does a company truly be seen as green?

Can IT Solve the World’s Problems? The information technology sector is responsible for 2% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, but its impact on the other 98% is growing rapidly. Hardware, software, and service providers are creating new products and services that are enabling large and small companies to better measure and manage their environmental impacts.

When Green Business Meets Cleantech: It used to be that green business and clean technology were separate realms. No longer. Today, the two are converging, as global companies and start-ups alike are harnessing clean technology as the foundation for a new generation of green business opportunities. The result are some unlikely corporate players and alliances.

On a personal note, it’s been about a year since I began working with The Energy Collective and Greenbiz. Robin Carey at TEC and Joel Makower and Pete May at Greenbiz are great partners, and their support for my writing makes this blog possible. So, thanks guys!

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Blogging for fun and profit

March 4, 2009

This blog began as an experiment on August 10, 2006. Soon it grew into a habit. Now – some 341 postings and too many words to count later — it has become a (small) business, I’m pleased to say.

I liked blogging from the get-go. I felt liberated from the constraints of space (always a problem, even when writing magazine-length stories for FORTUNE), freed to speak in my own voice (i.e., no editors), and able to publish immediately. The audience for this blog has always been small, but it has also become global, drawing readers from more than 30 countries, at last count. When I write about economic development in Rwanda or the Indian wind-power firm Suzlon, readers in those places find me, thanks, I suppose, to the magic of Google. This blog also has connected me to readers in a way that was never possible in the print world. It has not generated as many comments as I’d hoped it would, but it brings me a fair amount of feedback via email.

In the last few days, I have signed contracts with two websites that will carry the blog, as they have been doing for a while. The first is GreenBiz.com, which is led by Joel Makower and Pete May, and the second is The Energy Collective, a site founded by Robin Carey and Jerry Bowles. They’re well worth checking out.

I’ll be a senior writer at GreenBiz.com, which has established itself as the premiere website for business people looking for ways to make their companies more sustainable and profitable. I’m excited about working with GreenBiz.com for many reasons but a big one is the opportunity to work with Joel who, as many of you know, has been thinking, writing, speaking and consulting about business and sustainability for more than 20 years, long before the topic became chic. The AP described Joel as “the guru of green business,” and his smart and readable book, Strategies for the Green Economy, has been praised by such thinkers as architect Bill McDonough and William K. Reilly, the former EPA administrator. Joel is chairman and Pete May is the CEO of Greener World Media, whose online properties include GreenerBuildings.com, ClimateBiz.com, GreenerDesign.com, and GreenerComputing.com, as well as GreenBiz.com.

Besides blogging, I’ll be providing exclusive content to GreenBiz—a monthly podcast with leading thinkers and doers around the topic of business and sustainability. I’m also going to help Pete and Joel with events like their Greener By Design conference, which this year will be held in San Francisco on May 19-20.

The Energy Collective has a different focus and business model. It aggregates the work of leading bloggers who write about energy policy and technology, rather than hiring a staff of editors and writers. Bloggers like me have signed up with Energy Collective because it gives us access to a broader audience, and Energy Collective gets lots of ideas and words at a low cost. I’ve agreed to be one of four members of the group’s ‘Bloggers Board.’ The others three are “WattHead” Jesse Jenkins, of the Breakthrough Institute; nuclear expert Dan Yurman; and economics Professor John Whitehead, whose site is called Environmental Economics, of Appalachian State University.

“Our goal with The Energy Collective,” Robin says, “is to create a vibrant, back-and-forth discussion between the smartest people in the world about energy and the environment, and in so doing, find new solutions and common ground.”

At Energy Collective, I’ll help recruit other bloggers to the platform, provide regular comments and host webinars for the company. I’ll also do some exclusive podcasts for the site. I’m looking forward to working with Robin, who I met for the first time early this year in Abu Dhabi, of all places, because she is a world-class expert in social media. She and Jerry also started a popular blog aggregation site called Social Media Today, and so I am counting on them to guide me through the worlds of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the like.

Beside blogging, I am speaking, writing and consulting, organizing next months’ Brainstorm Green conference for FORTUNE, and generally staying a lot busier than I expected to be when I left the staff of the magazine at the end of last year. I will soon let you know about another new-media venture that I’ll be devoting lots of time to in 2009.

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