World is Green

When Investment Banks start getting into the sustainability field you know something is going right. Marc Gunther writes on his blog about Goldman Sachs, which was named the leading investment bank in the environment area in Fortune.

Investments: Goldman, as part of its environmental policy, invested about $1.5 billion in alternative energy and clean technology. It invested in Iogen, which is developing cellulosic ethanol, Horizon Wind Energy, which it now plans to sell at a profit, Sun Edison and First Solar, which are in the solar energy biz, and Nordex, which makes wind turbines. “We were an early mover, so it was a good investment strategy,” Tercek told me.

Research: Beginning in Europe, Goldman asked its research analysts to include environmental, social and governance factors when they analyze companies or industries. Guess what? Clients liked the extra analysis. The ESG research is being extended to the U.S. now. This isn’t a big profit center for Goldman, but the client response was a sign that investors are taking environmental risks and opportunities into account when they decide where to invest their money.

Deals: This is tricky area. Goldman promised in its policy “to take the environmental impacts and practices of our clients and potential clients into consideration as we make business selection decisions.” The policy also says Goldman will encourage clients to be transparent about their environmental impact, and to do business with “appropriate safeguards” in sensitive areas. These criteria could, in theory, stand in the way of winning investment banking deals and, like all bankers, Goldman’s lust for market share.

Even with these initiatives Goldman still finances Coal. Now this is a business so it will do what is best for the company and its shareholders. However, if more and more businesses create opportunities in the sustainability sector than Goldman, Bank of America and other companies are not far behind in financing them.

Seth Godin suggests that this may be the way of the future.

The NoImpact Man is a resident of New York who lives with his wife, daughter and a dog and is trying to live a no-impact life. He is chronicling his journey on his blog.

What is the philosophy behind this concept?

None of the practical questions about no impact living would be relevant if my wife Michelle, my daughter Isabella, our dog Frankie and I intended to approach the challenge by becoming ascetics. Until now, we have been your typical convenience-addicted, New York City take-out slaves. Asceticism is not a realistic way forward, not for my family and not for the world.

Saving this planet depends on finding a middle path that is neither unconsciously consumerist nor self-consciously anti-materialist. The idea for No Impact Man is not to be anorexic but to be abundant, not to be eco-efficient but “eco-effective,” in the words of the environmental scientists William McDonough and Michael Braungart.

The No Impact Man has a year long plan which is being implemented in stages. The interesting part of the discussion is what he means by no-impact. The laws of thermodynamics clearly show that you cannot have zero impact on the earth. If you consume you have an impact.

No Impact Man is my experiment with researching, developing and adopting a way of life for me and my little family—one wife, one toddler, one dog—to live in the heart of New York City while causing no net environmental impact. To do this, we will decrease the things we do that hurt the earth—make trash, cause carbon dioxide emissions, for example—and increase the things we do that help the earth—clean up the banks of the Hudson River, give money to charity, rescue sea birds, say.

In mathematical terms, in case you are an engineer or just a geek who likes math, we are trying to achieve an equilibrium that looks something like this:

Negative Impact + Positive Impact = Zero.

No net impact. Get it?

He understands that humans will live more in the cities than the rural areas. It is time for us to figure out how we can live Sustainably in the cities. This is a blog which needs to be followed.

Most importantly, this is the kind of thinking which individuals and organizations (corporate, government or not-for-profits) need to apply to create a sustainable world.

The Sydney Earth Hour is a initiative to switch off the lights for a hour on Saturday 31st March at 7:30 PM as a symbolic gesture to climate change.WWF-Australia claims that 1000 businesses have turned up to embrace the initiative and calls it “”Australia’s largest climate change initiative” which is questionable.

Terry McCrann puts things in perspective:

If this is all it takes to stop greenhouse gases frying the planet, I’d be happy to join in doing something which is completely painless and utterly pointless.

What exactly is it? Turning off the lights for one hour. But not at a time or on a day which might actually inconvenience business and therefore mean a real reduction in energy use.

To believe that would add up even to anywhere near four-fifths of five-eighths of very little of 5 per cent is to believe that the tooth fairy can do its job without nightlights.

When company boards and managements embrace fatuous symbolism it’s a bit of a worry. But as long as that’s all it is, so be it — we live in an age of meaningless gestures.

It is important that the debate is concentrated on doing more important things than turning lights off.

We should work towards cleaner base load energy, creating “cradle to cradle” industrial processes, building waste management systems and changing the culture in Australia. These are tougher and more important things to do.

A simple cost-benefit analysis will show that switching off lights on a saturday evening (when the lights should not have been on at all) is not the greatest response to the climate change problem.

Jag commented last week on the content of this weblog.

Lately your blog is becoming like a ‘News Feed’ than a blog. I like to see more of your thoughts and less of news. I guess there are other sources for that. I hope this is understood in positive note.

I think he has a valid point. Thanks for the feedback, Jag.

This is what I think.

There could be many roles for the blog. This blog will have a life if it provides a unique experience for my readers. When I started the blog my goal was to learn and connect. By writing on the blog I had a chance to understand the sustainability issues better and provide an opportunity to connect to like minded people.

Now that I have spent 3+ months on this blog it is time to have a rethink. To understand my readers better I am conducting a Poll. The following options are available on the Poll.

Please understand that this poll is to find what would like to see more of of the following. If you want more original content, or more of editorial content etc.

Original Content
One role for the blog is to provide some original content. The idea is to connect to new ideas, my experience and thoughts on some specific issues and may be some interviews.

Editorial Content

Second, the role of a editor.

I will select two to three articles everyday which I think are important, provide a excerpt and comment if needed. The idea is that my readers are busy people who may not check out all the green news for the day.

Link Log

In this role, the important part will be the selection of articles, audio and video content for my readers. You can find the current log on the right pane on the website or check out the new World is Green Links website.

Lastly, if you find the current combination is fine, just tell me so. If you any other ideas, please comment below.

I would like to hear from my readers what is that they are looking for. The poll will run for 2 weeks starting today.

The question is “What would you like more on this blog?”

You can check out the poll on the website or RSS and e-mail readers, click on this link.

“Every time I’ve done the right thing for the environment, I’ve made a profit.”
Yvon Chouinard

Ecoworld on Moser Bear’s foray into photovoltaics.

It should come as no surprise that India, a nation of over a billion people with one of the most advanced high technology sectors on earth, would be jumping big-time into the photovoltaic game. After all, photovoltaic energy, right now, is probably the most viable clean renewable energy technology candidate in the world to replace conventional energy sources.

Just last Monday, March 5th, one of the largest companies in India, Moser Baer, announced a partnership with one of the blue chip giants of California’s Silicon Valley, Applied Materials, to build the “world’s largest thin film fab.” The only thing we take issue with is the claim that it will be the largest - who is to say how long that claim will hold, when everywhere these days, from South Africa to Silicon Valley to Europe to China, thin film technologies of various vintages are sprouting, unstoppable, like the new grasses of spring.

Jeff McIntire-Strasburg at Green Options provides some fodder for discussion around the issue of “marketing” the concept of global warming.

Please be aware this is a long post.

Now marketing can mean many different things to different people but basically it is all about communication and creating an environment of change hopefully leading to action. This could mean changing customer’s behaviour to buy a particular product or changing a employee’s habit to conserve energy.

This discussion can be about ‘global warming’ or sustainability or any of the issues facing in the greening area.

In my current job, our goal is to increase the awareness of the issue of global warming and sustainability and through that the idea of energy efficiency, decreasing consumption, saving water, recycling, green procurement etc.

It is not a easy job to do, especially for two people for an organization with 6,500 people and 300 office buildings all over the state of South Australia. However, lets look at some ideas in implementing this in a large organization.

Tom Peter’s asked the critical question of branding.

Why is an issue that is so grave and so real so poorly understood? Why has the issue of global warming been so poorly marketed? Why is the brand called “The Global Warming Catastrophe” such a weak brand? What can—and should—be done?

In Google searches for these issues I came across a challenge issued by Asi Sharabi on his blog.

He asks:

How to change hearts, minds & behaviours? How to communicate urgency? How to move people from positive attitude to positive behaviour? How to make people care enough and change their lifestyle? How to contribute to the formation of a much needed critical mass, or tipping point that will alter the potentially catastrophic course we’re heading to? How to best exploit the emerging opportunities of the social web to ring a warning bell that its echoes will reverberate throughout the UK or even the world?

These are important questions to answer but the challenge is that the communication needs to be simple for it be effective.

Read the rest of this entry »

Whoever saw the movie, Who Killed the Electric Car? will have a tough time understanding why GM “killed” the car.

However, Jeff McIntire-Strasburg on Sustainblog was one of the bloggers who were invited to GM recently to check out the Volt, the new electric car from GM. I specifically want to quote from what GM CEO Rick Waggoner said about E-Flex.

What exactly do we mean by E-Flex? Well, the “E” is no surprise - it stands for “electric,” because no matter how an E-Flex vehicle is configured, it will always be driven exclusively by electricity.

This is the major difference between E-Flex and hybrids. Hybrids can be driven by an internal combustion engine, or an electric drive, or both systems simultaneously. E-Flex vehicles will always be driven by electricity.

What about the second half of the name? Well, that’s the really interesting part of all this. E-Flex is “flexible” because the electricity it uses to drive the vehicle can come from a wide range of fuel sources. It can come from a hydrogen fuel cell; it can be generated by a small motor running on ethanol or bio-diesel or synthetic fuel; or it can come from the power grid, and be stored in a battery. And, when the electricity comes from the grid, it can be generated by natural gas, coal, nuclear power, wind, hydroelectric, and so on.

In short, E-Flex vehicles will enjoy one of the really outstanding benefits of electricity: the opportunity to diversify fuel sources for the vehicle.

E-Flex is also flexible because it offers flexibility around the globe. Europeans rely more on diesel fuel than North Americans, Brazil has gravitated to E-100 ethanol, and we see tremendous opportunities with bio-fuels here in the U.S. China, meanwhile, may well be the first country to develop a broad-based fuel cell infrastructure.

By setting up a propulsion system that allows us to power vehicles with any of these fuels, E-Flex provides us with a single elegant solution.

In short, E-Flex creates options. It’ll allow GM to leverage a range of electrically driven propulsion systems, as well as benefit from the inevitability and the promise of energy diversity.

I think this is an important strategic move by GM. Powering automobiles by electric technology is far more suitable than even a hybrid. In the end, diversity of electricity sources will make this a greener option.

Noam Ross writes about the honey bee pollination service and the importance of ecosystem services to a business.

If your business’s only supplier of a key service folded all of a sudden, what would you do?

That is what a lot of agricultural companies are asking themselves right now. As reported in the New York Times last week, honeybee colonies in 24 states have collapsed. Colony populations have crashed by 30-70 percent, causing bee prices to skyrocket at and sending a $14 billion agricultural sector scrambling for insects to pollinate their crops. Yet there are not many options out there. The U.S. agriculture has grown increasingly dependent on trucked-in bees as natural pollinator populations have declined from habitat fragmentation and pesticides since the mid-20th century.

If a business had such a clear warning about its supply chain, one would think it would work to diversify or at least do what they could to shore up their suppliers to ensure their continued viability. Yet as we’re learning from the bee crisis, few companies examine the risks related to ecosystem services, like pollination, that they rely on. These risks may be large — according to the Millennium Assessment, two-thirds of ecosystems worldwide are being degraded or used unsustainably, and degradation will likely accelerate over the next 50 years.

Hanson is leading the development of a “Corporate Ecosystem Services Review”, a methodology to assess business risk and new opportunities arising from the damaged state of ecosystems. The review will be designed to help companies figure out what ecosystem services they depend on and impact most, and then devise strategies to deal with the risks and opportunities represented.

Alice Kenny on the increasing carbon offset deals in the market:

The voluntary carbon market surged 1000 percent over the past two years, according to recent reports. It racked in sales of over $100 million last year and is set to double again by next year. Yet no single standard exists to appraise the quality of marketed carbon offsets, forcing consumers to rely on advertisements for much of their education. In the short term, this could prove a bonanza for businesses marketing carbon offsets. But in the long term, it could compromise this consumer-driven market’s credibility, threatening inroads made in the battle against global warming.

The voluntary carbon market is not only just a first step; it is also a baby step. Voluntary offsets can lead the market but cannot solve the problem of global warming. Most scientists agree that seven billion tons of carbon emissions must be prevented from entering the atmosphere over the next 50 years to make a dent in global warming. The voluntary market can only deliver about 1/10,000 of these emissions cuts, Trexler estimates. Its strength, then, lies in its potential to spur massive government efforts to limit carbon emissions from large-scale emitters. If consumers lose confidence in their ability to fight global warming, they may be less likely to agitate for these reductions.