World is Green

Over the past year or so I have been covering the green industry to understand it better. Over the course, it became apparent that the biggest stories are about the people behind these initiatives.

In the course of being in this industry and writing on the blog I have come across some interesting people who are trying to make it big in this industry in their own way. In order to tell their story, I have decided to conduct an interview with them. The idea is to understand the stories at a more personal and knowledgable level.

I have no specific publishing schedule, but would try to do about 3 interviews a month.

Our guest today is Sreenivas Ghatty. Sreenivas is the founder and CEO of Tree Oils India. With all the interest in Biofuels Sreenivas believes that there is a great future for using them as an alternate fuel of choice.

Thank you for giving me this opportunity. I have a Masters in Agriculture and was a corporate banker in India and Dubai for 18 years until I entered the Biodiesel industry in 2003. I live in Melbourne with my wife and two daughters and keep travelling to India and other countries regularly.What is your company about?

Tree Oils India Limited was established in 2003 to produce Biodiesel from non-edible oils. Please visit our web site (www.treeoilsindia.com) to learn more about this company. Bear with me if some of the information is obsolete as the contents have not been updated during the last five years. As non-edible feedstocks were not available in sufficient quantities and at reasonable pricen at the time, we started with plantation activity. As there were no tested varities of these tree species and knowledge of agronomy was limited, we started an R&D farm to begin with. So, as of now, we are a technical-know-how company, trying to develop non-edible oil-bearing trees such as Pongamia, Jatropha etc.

Few people have influenced me like Atanu Dey and Rajesh Jain when I worked with them at Deeshaa Ventures. I consider the 1+ year that I have spent with them as  a “black swan” moment.

According to the Wikipedia:

In Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s definition, a black swan is a large-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations.

Rajesh writes in his blog on Turning 40 and his goals for India and Atanu’s influence on him. An inspiring read.

Three Goals

Here are three things I’d like to do in the rest of my life and which will require investments of hundreds of millions of dollars. This is not about philanthropy, but about building the right systems and foundation - in a sort-of self-generating way. Ideally, the Indian government should have been the enabler - but I don’t see that happening with the politicians we have. Indian business has started taking the lead but is not doing this fast enough - and in some cases, is not even doing it right.

First, ensuring access to quality education for hundreds of millions of Indians. Education is a life-enhancer - and nothing comes close. My father was helped by his education to get out of the village he grew up in and created opportunities for himself. How can we do the same for millions in India who are otherwise resigned to a life devoid of opportunity? This is not about trying to build the world’s best school or college, but ensuring that a sustainable and scalable system to provide quality education for everyone in India. For more, read Atanu Dey’s series on Doing Education Right.

Second, we need to build hundreds of new cities to house the hundreds of millions of people who we need to get out from the villages. Our current cities are bursting at the seams. Creating urban slums in not the answer. We need 600 new cities of a million each or 6,000 towns of 100,000 each - or a mix of both. But there is no way we can provide any reasonable future to pockets of 1,000 people living in 600,000 villages. In other words, India cannot afford its villages - and needs to urbanise fast. Else, the demographic dividend will turn out to a big nightmare. Creating these new cities right - in a clean, green, and self-sustainable way - is what I’d like to see us do. For more, read Atanu Dey’s series on Creating India’s New Cities.

Finally, I want to create a Santa Fe-like institution in India. It should be a place where multi-disciplinary thinking is the norm. It should be a magnet for smart people to spend time interacting with the best in different areas so they can forge multiple mental models which can then go out and solve problems right. We go wrong in solutions because we have partial knowledge and so we do not understand the real problem. This leads to what I call brain-dead decisions. An institution like this will ensure that we make the right decisions for the future. It will create a platform for the innovations we will continue to need.

The day after we had sold IndiaWorld for $115 million in November 1999, my wife, Bhavana, told me: “We are custodians of God’s money. If God has given us money at such an early age, there must be something He has in mind for us. We have to utilise this wealth for the greater good.” These are words which have formed the bedrock of my life since then. Till then, I was an entrepreneur trying to prove that I could, even after repeated failures, be successful at least once. Since then, I have come to believe that what good we need to do, we have to do in our present life - while we still have the physical and mental energies.

Apart from his vision, his and Bhavana’s belief that whatever good that needs to be done is now, when they are at their prime of their life is the most inspiring and the right thing to do.

In the current Climate Change talks in Bali, there is a great debate about the role of India and China in cutting down their greenhouse gases. This story provides a good viewpoint of the current problem facing India.

The Mint has an interview with Harish Hande, the founder of SELCO-India and the winner of the 2007 Social Entrepreneur of the Year award in India.

The problem: In a country where we spend thousands of watts of electricity for a day and night cricket match, use the power greedy heater to ward off the winter chill, there lies another India where villages are dimly lit by paraffin lamps and dim lights battling darkening chimneys. For this cash-strapped India an ignited filament powered by current is a rare luxury, for they cannot even afford electricity.

Finding basic electricity is still an issue in India. How do you convince those people that they need to cut down their carbon emissions?

Hande is working towards building solar home systems for poor people in India with technicians on the ground understanding the actual requirements. He is collaborating with banks to provide an affordable way to own these systems.

In terms of economics, Hande has some interesting cost figures.

For example, there are 20 million street vendors in the country. In Delhi, a street vendor pays Rs15-20 everyday for an incandescent light. We do not pay Rs600 a month for a single light, neither do we pay Rs2,400 a month for four lights. That means poor people pay more for energy. It is the same case with Bangalore street vendors who pay Rs15 every evening for a kerosene lamp they use for four hours whereas solar costs Rs5-6, that too for five to six hours. It is a grave reality that the poor end up paying more for energy. Surely, this needs far more serious intervention.

And on the role of government.

In terms of central and state governments, the biggest plus is that they are not interfering. I have seen it in other countries like Dominican Republic where the government suddenly appeared on the scene, subsidized it, and spoiled the whole programme. However, the government can help by replicating our work on a mass scale. For that, we need many similar social enterprises and government policies that can creating caps in financial institutions, in much the same way as they did for agricultural financing 40-50 years ago.

Peter Drucker, the famed managament guru of the 20th century, talked a lot about work and its effect on people. Most of the people/workers want to believe that their most valuable time and effort is worth something in the end.

From Ed B in a LinkedIn Answer:

Workers who feel they are contributing to some greater good and can “sense real progress toward meeting that greater good”, tend to value themselves more highly as workers and tend to perceive fewer barriers to getting the work done.

This feeling brings about satisfaction and leads to what Drucker called “work as achieving”.

While working in Deeshaa I had that distinct feeling that there was a great satisfaction in what I was doing. The entire exercise in sacrificing our personal money, time and effort to live in a city like Mumbai, commute for 3+hrs a day to achieve an almost impossible dream was well worth it.

A lot of young people I interacted during that time were trying to find some ”meaningful” work. I did not have any answers then and nor do I have any now. What I did learn was in the end we all need to follow “a path with a heart”. In someways, I am still trying to recreate that magic.

One example of that is the story reported in the BBC about Drs Paul and Claudia Turner.

This time last year, they were both on the senior registrar rung - Paul in microbiology and Claudia in paediatrics - when they began to get itchy feet.

Fast-forward 12 months and that itch has been well and truly scratched.

Today, the couple are living on the Thai-Burmese border, working among a refugee population and on the verge of launching a cutting-edge study into pneumonia, under the auspices of the one of the world’s most prestigious tropical medicine research units.

“We were both disillusioned with the NHS, not just the structure but the users as well, and we wanted to work in an environment where we saw people who really needed medical care,” said Claudia.

“It sounds trite but we wanted to make a difference - and also to have a bit of adventure.”

The Shoklo Malaria Research Unit (SMRU) is located in the small town of Mae Sot, northwest Thailand.
[...]
“It’s unusual to be able to get involved in such fundamentally important research in the West, but in Asia there has been very little work done on many potentially treatable conditions, including childhood pneumonia.”
[...]
“It’s satisfying not only because this work has the potential to impact on a global scale, but because of the difference we’re making locally - the rewards are much more apparent and immediate than in the NHS.

When I left ADP Wilco for Deeshaa I sent a mail to my colleagues about my decision which contained a verse from “Notes to Myself” by Hugh Prather.

Those sentences still make a lot of sense.

I have always believed in the concept of ‘the Compass and the Clock’. The clock helps us to plan, organize time and space, initiate projects and see them through to completion. But the compass shows us the “True North”. The direction in life that we choose to take. And I am starting a new journey which takes me nearer to my “True North”.

“There is a part of me that wants to write
a part that wants to theorize, a part that
wants to sculpt, a part that wants to
reach…To force myself into a single
role, to decide to be just one thing in life,
would kill off large parts of me.

My career will form behind me. All I can
do is let this day come to me in peace. All
I can do is take the step before me now,
and not fear repeating an effort or making
a new one.”

P.N : The verse “There is a part of me…” has been taken from the book ‘Notes to Myself’ by Hugh Prather.

In Green jobs with Growth potential; I wrote that; “Makower has some good advice. It is important to gain a skill and then have a green tinge to it and not get pigeonholed into a environmental division… In that sense, environmental divisions will become redundant. The environmental lens will become part of the other lenses used by executives.”

Now ‘The forex blog has more on how to green (environmental and social aspects) your financial career:

If you’re interested in a financial career, you might be curious about how your interests can lead to reconciliation between your job and your belief system…Social finance means that financial instruments are used to promote social goals. Financial instruments used to accomplish these goals include credit, savings, investments, and loans, among other devices.

[...]

Social finance careers have expanded to the point where you can attend a school in London that focuses solely on social entrepreneurship. Whether your interests lie in a nonprofit or for profit participation in this specialized industry, you might wonder where your opportunities lie. Some social finance positions might include:

Community Investor: The community investor works with other individuals to gather, oversee, and direct capital to community investment opportunities in local or regional areas or abroad.

Micro-Financier:This individual seeks to provide impoverished individuals or communities with the means to invest or borrow money for business or community development.

Nonprofit Sector: The nonprofit sector is also the most diverse when it comes to opportunities. While some individuals are content to volunteer for nonprofit efforts, you can also seek a career as an executive or work as a freelance grant writer or project coordinator.

Social Entrepreneur: Unlike venture capitalists, social entrepreneurs provide innovative solutions to difficult social problems usually without seeking personal profit.

[...]

If you want to incorporate a social angle to your career objective, you will also need to expand your skills and experience through education and work. You can expect to gain the following:

Interdisciplinary Skills:You can also focus on technological, environmental, or leadership facets to social financial careers. Your interdisciplinary needs will depend upon whether you want to focus more on social or financial aspects within this field.

Leadership Opportunities: Social financing is a means to create innovative ways to improve social environments, and this field needs creative leaders who can take the initiative in many situations.

Flexibility: Careers in social financing currently may be definitive or broad and fairly undefined. You many find a way to travel the globe, or you may seek a situation where you’re alone and surrounded by books and archival materials.

Global Knowledge: Even if you end up in a back office surrounded by social financing accounting books, you will learn much about how people live in other communities around the world

Forbes has a collection of possible green jobs which have a future in the coming years.

The greening of industry is creating a constellation of new careers, and they’re not your everyday forestry professions. Many of them are environmental twists on old professions, like law, or in Makower’s case, journalism. Others are engineering careers tied to research in renewable technologies like wind energy and ethanol production. For instance:

– Emissions brokers: In a market economy, credits to emit greenhouse gases can be traded on an exchange, and brokers facilitate the deal. If the U.S. ever moves to a mandatory trading system, expect this field to boom.

– Bio-mimicry engineers: This new branch of science uses Mother Nature as a model for solving engineering problems. For example, Atlanta’s Sto Corp. created a self-cleaning paint that repels dirt whenever it gets wet, just like the lotus leaf does.

– Sustainability coordinators: Corporations from AstraZeneca to Wal-Mart are now employing managers to oversee the economic and environmental components of company efforts.

– Green architects: With an increasing focus on energy-efficient buildings, a growing number of architects and developers are getting certified to become specialists in green design.

Universities–particularly business schools–also see opportunity. Schools such as Stanford, the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina and the University of Michigan offer joint M.B.A./environmental science masters degrees. Derrick Bolton, director of admissions at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, says many students are taking positions with corporations that have a commitment to the environment.

Makower’s advice to students pursuing a green job is to learn all they can about business. The most exciting things are happening in product design, research and development, manufacturing, and buildings and grounds. “If you go into the environmental part of a company, you become ghettoized,” he says.

The slideshow has more jobs. If you follow the jobs; a pattern emerges. A green job is not a new kind of job except say, a Sustainability Coordinator, but it is more of a twist on the old jobs. A emissions trader is a trader first; a bio-mimicry engineer is a engineer first and so on.

Makower has some good advice. It is important to gain a skill and then have a green tinge to it and not get pigeonholed into a environmental division. If the current trend continues then environmental/sustainability principles will become part of business (like quality standards, customer focus, financial analysis). Good design will have sustainability principles but there cannot be one ‘green designer’. In that sense, environmental divisions will become redundant. The environmental lens will become part of the other lenses used by executives.

Writing this blog post, I realise that I need to rethink of where I am going!

Vinod Khosla has a large portfolio of energy investments which I had blogged about yesterday. Since the time I had known his interest in bio-fuels he has moved on. This intrigued me and I wanted to understand his thinking behind the “energy issue” and what could be the possible solutions.

Khosla on his website provides some resources to the issues close to his heart. In one of the essays titled Environmentalists vs Pragmatists (Download: Word Doc) he comes out with a strong case against the ideas of Dr. Hermann Scheer. Dr. Scheer is a Member of the German Parliament and he has introduced a novel solar scheme in Germany which has transformed the solar industry in Germany and makes it a world leader in this area.

Sometime back, Scheer and Khosla had a debate on “how” to solve the energy issue and the related pollution problems. Scheer backs renewable energy; especially solar cells, and wind; he is against the electric grid and prefers a government mandated, higher cost, distributed, solar generation for every home.

In this essay, apart from making a case against Scheer’s ideas; which he calls Scheer nonsense and he provides a good look into his understanding of “the energy issue”, what kinds of solutions will work, his investment philosophy, and thus, leading to his investment decision making.

Recently, I was on a panel with Dr. Herman Scheer, a member of the German parliament and the president of EUROSOLAR (The European Association for Renewable Energy) and a much honored “environmentalist”. Suffice it to say that there was great commonality of goals but significant disagreement about “how”……India, China, and other countries are rapidly industrializing and bringing basic electric power services to their peoples. Their development, like US electric power, follows least-cost options. Our least-cost electric power options – coal-fired power plants – are by far our most destructive and dangerous ones…

…As such, we must address some basic rules: For any energy scheme to be viable, it must be cost effective, and it must be scalable. If solutions don’t get adopted in India and China global warming control efforts are futile. To scale, they must make economic sense in China and India….If we allocate the same carbon emission per person worldwide (an equal right to pollute for every human) we are toast at anywhere near current levels of US emissions or even at levels of carbon emission in Europe…To achieve these goals, we must provide services that consumers want and prefer over their non-sustainable fossil competitors, while at the same time be profitable for business…

…Applications that meet the engineering needs but fail to meet the commercial ones are doomed to failure, which provides one of the key reasons for my disagreements with Dr. Scheer. …

Two things Khosla suggests are important to understand. First, it needs to be a low-cost option; commercially viable and acceptable in India and China; and second, an equal right to pollute for every human; which is the argument of per capita emissions that I have made several times.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Rocky Mountain Institute has an interview with its’ co-founder Amory Lovins (Hat tip: Peak Energy)

What impact has RMI had over the past 25 years?
More than we often realize or dared to hope. We’ve created much of the
basic intellectual capital — in technology, policy, and business
strategy — that underpins natural capitalism (www.naturalcapitalism.org), the energy and water efficiency revolutions, green real-estate development, renewable energy, Factor Ten engineering (www.10xe.org), and profitable solutions to the oil (www.oilendgame.com), climate, and nuclear proliferation problems. We’ve been a key driver in saving over half the oil and natural gas, a sixth of the electricity, and two-thirds of the water that the U.S. now uses per dollar of GDP (vs. 1975), and similarly in dozens of nations.

Our syntheses of new approaches to energy, cars, hydrogen, security, and several other fields are starting to be adopted. Our reframings — end-use/least-cost, the right size for the job, resilience — now informmany disciplines.

Hundreds of our alumni/ae are making important contributions. And thousands of people I meet all over the world say we’ve inspired them to rekindle hope and commit to action.

How would you contrast the issues and methods of RMI in its early years with the work it does now?
We’ve become more disciplined without losing our spark, more capable
without losing our agility. We’ve gotten better at aikido politics,
more astute about how to harness causality and influence, and far more
deeply engaged with commerce as our prime instrument of outreach and
effectiveness. Now we’re poised for a whole new level of effectiveness.

What do you see as the best strategy RMI can undertake to ensure that its ideas go to scale in the market?

So far we’ve implemented our efficiency concepts mainly by helping early
private-sector adopters succeed so conspicuously that their rivals are
forced by competitive pressure to follow suit or lose share. We’ve
begun to use the “demand pull” of huge organizations like Wal-Mart and News Corporation to change wider market behavior. We’ve begun to get better at injecting new business models into troubled industries at critical moments, to practice institutional acupuncture, and to inform the enormously powerful private capital market. But we’re always seeking more and better trimtabs.

Our biggest puzzle is how to make natural capitalism (www.naturalcapitalism.org)
into a beneficial social virus that propagates itself exponentially
with network mathematics, rather than our having to introduce it to one
company at a time, which works well but isn’t fast enough.

In my quest to understand Sustainability and its linkage to business; Geoff Wells has been playing the role of a mentor to me for the past year. Geoff Wells is currently the Joint Managing Director of Imperative Plus Pty Ltd and a Adjunct Professor at the International Graduate School of Business in Adelaide where I studied my MBA.

Geoff has been blogging  for a few months now. If you are interested in sustainability and business and want to understand from a leading thinker in the field, look no further.

Check out his blog here.

When a visionary like Rupert Murdoch speaks we need to listen…very carefully. From owning a small newspaper in Australia he now owns and heads one of the top media companies in the world. Now, he announces that News Corp has acknowledged the risks in Climate Change and wants to tackle it head on.

Rupert Murdoch gave a speech a couple of years back on how the media landscape has changed and how the audiences are different from before. He saw the trend, accepted the challenge and then, he bought MySpace.com. From nowehere, he owned one of the most popular sites in the world and making more money then he coughed up for the company with a single advertising deal with Google. As he says, he took a small risk and re-invented themselves.

Now, Climate change is similar for News Corp. Going carbon neutral is good. Cutting down energy is good. But Rupert realises that he can make a bigger difference. For good or bad, he has had a strong influence on his large media network across the world. Now, that influence may make a big difference.

In his speech he spells out the potential:

But becoming carbon neutral is only the beginning. The climate problem will not be solved by one company reducing its emissions to zero, and it won’t be solved by one government acting alone.
The climate problem will not be solved without mass participation by the general public in countries around the globe.

And that’s where we come in.

We’re starting with our own carbon footprint. Not nothing. But much of what we’re doing is already, or soon will be, little more than the standard way of doing business.

Our audience’s carbon footprint is 10,000 times bigger than ours… That’s the carbon footprint we want to conquer. We cannot do it with gimmicks. We need to reach them in a sustained way. To weave this issue into our content– make it dramatic, make it vivid, even sometimes make it fun. We want to inspire people to change their behavior.Imagine if we succeed in inspiring our audiences to reduce their own impacts on climate change by just one percent. That would be like turning the State of California off for almost two months.

And imagine if… we were able to take on the carbon footprint of our audience in Asia. Many of the most serious impacts of climate change will be felt there, and China and India’s emissions are rising rapidly. STAR is the number one Hindi-language network in the world. In India alone, we reach 100 million people.

The challenge is to revolutionize the message.

For too long, the threats of climate change have been presented as doom and gloom– because the consequences are so serious.

We need to do what our company does best: make this issue exciting. Tell the story in a new way.

The biggest challenge that I have seen with Climate Change and other sustainability issues is the marketing. Changing people’s behaviour is a herculean task. We have to wait and see how this strategy actually gets implemented but the signs are positive.

The real message in the speech is this: The unique potential– and duty– of a media company are to help its audiences connect to the issues that define our time.