World is Green

Sustainability as a Business Strategy was the title of my previous post. Well, The Greenest Host is a fine example of that.

Data centers are big consumers of energy around the world. There has been reports that the IT industry’s emissions are equivalent to the airline industry. Google has talked about bring about efficient data centers. Sun Microsystems has launched it’s eco-efficient data center design.

Now, Greenest Host comes out of a good idea to capture a green niche. According to the company, they have built a energy-efficient data center which is powered 100% by solar energy. Unlike their competitors who buy Renewable Energy Credits to offset their energy use, Greenest Host uses 100% clean energy.

In terms of branding, they have captured a piece of the consumers mind in the data center space. It needs to be seen how they will actually perform in the marketplace however, this is a really good green strategy which captures a growing Green niche.

Update: A little search suggests that there are other clean energy powered green hosts.

Japan, the world’s second largest economy has been languishing for more than 15 years now. How do change this? How do you create a innovative Japan?

One project is the Innovation 25. Red Herring has some notes from Kiyoshi Kurokawa’s Powerpoint presentation.

One theme from the Innovation 25 is the big opportunity in environmental or sustainability.

Opportunities for Japan’s Innovation Strategy

Japan is known throughout the world for its strengths in manufacturing (in the broad sense of the term) and “environmental or green” technology such as that for clean energy. We need to further develop these strengths by offering these products and services to Asia and the world.

Society that Contributes Significantly to Resolving Global Environmental Issues

By 2025, innovation could see Japan become a society where:

-The public as well as the government and corporations make daily efforts to resolve environmental issues at the global level . These efforts will include radical reduction of the sources of global warming, efficient energy use, and waste and water management. Japan would lead the world by taking these initiatives.
-The public will be exposed to issues related to the natural environment and will take voluntary actions to save energy and implement the 3R’s (Re-use,Reduce and Recycle) in everyday life. For example, grade schools will provide children with opportunities to learn about the environment and energy use .
- Corporations will support such activities using multiple measures including paid-holidays for those undertaking such activities.
- Ongoing and ambitious efforts will establish Japan as a model of sustainability in the world. Abundant opportunities will be given to young people from Asia and elsewhere at universities and corporations in Japan so that they learn the skills to balance environmental, social and economic development in their home countries in a sustainable way.

Global Environmental Issues as a Driver for Economic Growth and International Contribution

Environmental and energy issues will increase in significance as efforts continue to promote world economic development. Clean energy, green technology, nanotechnology and biotechnology developed in Japan should serve as the main drivers for economic growth. This will provide Japan with an ideal opportunity to contribute to the resolution of these global issues.

Not only for Japan but for every country and company; sustainability provides a great new opportunity to solve some of the world’s problems and create huge new opportunities.

Continuing on an earlier story on the pulp mill in Tasmania, Cousins is coming with the following ad in the Environmental minister’s electorate of Wentworth.

The pulp mill is claimed by the company to be the ”greenest in the world”; however, the only cost-benefit analysis conducted showed that it would effect the wine and tourism industries in the Tamar Valley.

As the Age reports, now some 120 people are with Cousins including many big names.

The ad says:
“Is Malcolm Turnbull the Minister for the Environment or the Minister Against the Environment?” It says Mr Turnbull can insist on all voices being heard. “But will he? So many questions, so far no answers … Will Malcolm Turnbull insist that a proper public hearing be implemented before he decides on the building of one of the world’s largest pulp mills in Tasmania’s Tamar Valley?”

Jupiter Research on the growing green trends.

Banking Green Online
One-fifth of the online population are so-called green financial services consumers, i.e., consumers would buy more financial products from institutions that are committed to protecting the environment. Among the five major banks included in the survey, Bank of America’s customers express the highest satisfaction with the bank’s environmental efforts. Other institutions should raise their green profiles by launching both image-enhancing and sales-supporting initiatives.

Green Grown-Ups
Green adults (21 percent of all online adults) skew older than average and are not necessarily affluent. They are also more engaged with user-generated content (UGC) than are overall online users. Marketers must understand their usage of this content to avoid misplaced campaigns.

Green Teens
Green teens (15 percent of online teens) are popular, engaged in school activities, and a little artsy. Music and entertainment programming and social media will appeal to them, and they’re likely to respond positively to online marketing.

Remember, you need to pay to access the research though.

Well, the story of the pulp mill proposed by Gunns in the state of Tasmania in Australia is the story of many names, environmental issues, political plots and cost-benefit analysis.

Starting with the names. Gunns is proposing the cleanest and greenest pulp mill in the world. Wood is the owner and millionaire founder of wotif.com; one of most successful internet travel site. Cousins was the politicial consultant to John Howard, the prime minister of Australia for a decade and is the Government-appointed member of the Telstra board. He also sits on big company boards like Seven Network and IAG. Turnbull is the $125 million  (2005, BRW) worth businessman turned Environmental minister of the Howard
government.

Gunns proposed a pulp mill in Tasmania which was fast tracked by the Premier of Tasmania and the Federal government along with the approval of the Labour opposition. With Labour losing 3 marginal seats in the 2004 election in Tasmania over its timber policy; current opposition leader Kevin Rudd was not ready to sacrifice the seats.

However, what changed in the entire game is the combination of big and small businessmen along with the Greens to campaign against the proposed Gunns mill.

Gunns is proposing to build the greenest pulp mill in the world in the beautiful Tamar Valley, north of the city of Launceston. I visited Tasmania last Christmas and Launceston is a beautiful town. Tasmania as a whole has one of the most well preserved natural beauty in Australia. And tourists like myself are a big growth industry.

As the Australian explains: While zoned industrial, the Long Reach site is on the Tamar Valley wine route, renowned for its world-class cool-climate wines and successful tourist industry built on fine food and quality produce.

With Cousins joining Wood and others in this campaign it is becoming one set of businessman against another busieness. And why is this happening?

However Tasmania’s peak wine group, Wine Industry Tasmania, which has a Gunns representative on its board, has bluntly warned the mill’s allowable emission of odours and air pollutants threaten to “devastate” the region’s 27 vineyards, visited by 150,000 tourists each year.

Tasmania’s peak fishing body, the Fishing Industry Council, has made similar dire predictions about northern rock lobster, abalone, scallop and shark fisheries if dioxins contaminate seafood stock.

Both industries are frantically lobbying Turnbull and the Upper House to ensure, at the very least, Gunns faces automatic fines and mill shutdown if it breaches the guidelines. But such controls appear absent from the state permit conditions.

Adding the 150,000 tourists who visit this area every year, this becomes a significant business issue for all those involved there. Interestingly, the only cost-benefit analysis conducted on the pulp mill has concluded negatively against the mill.

Gunns claims the mill, which will create 290 full-time jobs once fully operational, will add $6.7 billion, or 2.5 per cent to the Tasmanian economy and an additional $894 million in extra tax revenue between 2008 and 2030.

The roundtable assessment - the only cost-benefit study done on the project - concludes Gunns has double-counted the tax benefits and failed to show $847.3 million in subsidies to the project. It puts dollar figures on impacts predicted by the tourism and fishing industries and health impacts of emissions predicted by the Australian Medical Association.

“If you add up risks to health and other (local) industries, plus the costs and subsidies, the total is $3.3 billion,” it concludes. “On a range of realistic scenarios, the pulp mill project may cause an economic loss to the state. The proposed mill does not represent sustainable development for Tasmania.”

The entry of Cousins is significant in this as he is taking this to Turnbull’s marginal seat in the coming Federal elections in Sydney.

Yesterday he (Cousins) told The Australian that he and others planned a campaign in Mr Turnbull’s eastern Sydney seat of Wentworth to inform voters about the minister’s “total cop-out” in approving the mill, which he said would devastate Tasmania’s tourism industry.

“A number of us are looking very carefully at Malcolm Turnbull’s failure to handle this matter in what we think is the appropriate way,” Mr Cousins said.

A bigger story was published in the Telegragh which calls it “Paradise Razed”.

On the Australian island of Tasmania, primeval forests are being felled and then napalmed, protected species poisoned, and water sources contaminated with pesticide – all to satisfy a rapacious logging industry, and all with the blessing of the government. Richard Flanagan reports on an ongoing saga of greed, corruption, political cowardice and ecological catastrophe.

It needs to be seen what happens in the end, but with the fight between the big names out in the open it is a very different ecological campaign.

GigaOm; the technology blog started by Om Malik of Business 2.0 has started morphing into a media network of its own sometime back starting with the move to group blogging and then various tech related blogs and even a jobs section.

Now they are moving into the Green sector; “Apparently like everyone else…”.

The Earth2Tech blog will concentrate on the growing Clean tech industry.

So we envisioned our site this way: One part clean tech startup coverage – (a quick look at clean tech venture numbers shows the growing ranks of startups in hot areas like solar and biofuels); One part reviews of tech giant’s eco-initiatives (is Google’s carbon neutral initiative more marketing or responsible plan?); One part a resource page for entrepreneurs and Valley types looking for green tech [tools, rules, tips] – LBS meets ethanol?

One of the first posts is an interview with VC Sunil Paul who compares the Clean Tech industry with the IT/Internet industry.

One thing that has remained the same is that there are huge amounts of capital required for this business, which is very different from the Internet world. Two opposite extremes.

Another thing to realize is that compared to all the IT sectors, cleantech is a very slow moving industry. For example, batteries, which are fundamentally driven by product cycles at the customer level. Customers expect a product with a 25-year lifetime, or a 10-year lifetime – you’re not going to suddenly have a 6-month product life cycle. That is an important lesson.

Another important lesson is that engagement with government is fundamental. For IT or biotech, you didn’t have to think too much about government. But in the energy world that is just not the case. Regulations are changing all the time.

The clean-tech world has been built by environmentalists going to bat for technologists. The environmentalists have carried our water for us. At some point we will have to step up and be more engaged because this is an important battle.

I blogged sometime back on the Energy investments of Vinod Khosla. Clean tech is growing everywhere and this could be one of the exciting new frontiers for the business world.

Financial Times writes about a survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Business is failing to exploit the opportunities presented by growing public concerns over climate change, according to a survey of top executives from around the world.

The survey, by the Economist Intelligence Unit, found that only one in 10 of the businesses surveyed were fully monitoring their overall carbon impact, and most of the companies did not see environmental strategy as a way to improve their market position.

More than a third of the executives said carbon reduction would enhance their image. But only 15 per cent saw it as a marketing opportunity and just 7 per cent as a way of differentiating their products.

One in six companies that had started to cut their carbon emissions said the measures had already boosted profits, while a third expected a boost in the next three years. Only one in 10 complained of higher costs, now or expected in the future.

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. 

Sushil Kumar, a professor at the Indian Institute of Management - Lucknow (IIM-L), one of the top of MBA schools in the country, writes about the newly introduced “Corporate Environmental Management and Carbon Markets” course.

Professor Kumar points to the increasing interest from large corporates from the Indian industry who are interested in the Clean Development Mechanism and he actually puts a number on the certified emission reduction (CER) units per year available in India right now at USD 2 billion.

In this scenario he believes it is important that B-Schools take up the initiative to train managers for a changing future.

The objectives of the course on Corporate Environmental Mangement and Carbon Markets are as follows:

• To provide an overview of global and national environmental policy/law issues.
• To discuss the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), Environmental Management Plan (EMP), and Environmental Management Systems (EMS).
• To examine and analyse various strategies of environmental management.
• To describe implementation of the Kyoto Protocol and understand Emission Trading Systems.
• To understand the Clean Development Mechanism from the perspective of business in India.

This is great stuff. In my MBA, I had to struggle to find courses which would help to understand this field from a business  point of view better.

I decided to do an elective in Environmental and Resource Economics from the Economics department in Adelaide University which provided the theory and a self-managed course in Environmental Accounting provided a practical grounding. And, all through the MBA I took the time to read books, follow stories and people to connect the learnings in the MBA to the green new world of the future.  For more information on what I did and the books I read check the post Life Study - Continous Personal Development.

I hope more schools around the world take the tip from IIM-L.

Dr. Nachiket Mor, Chairman, New Ventures India Steering Committee and Deputy Managing Director, ICICI Bank announces a 100 cr fund to invest in Green Businesses in India (hat tip: Karen Seeh).

Dr. Mor also announced Rs.100 crore investment towards the innovation and development of green businesses in India.

“The burden of climatic changes will be borne by the developing countries, therefore opening up a huge market for green business and the market of clean energy is going to double by 2015″, he said.

India has to maintain its GDP growth to become a developed country and green businesses have lot of growth potential for Indian economy, he added.

India offers a great opportunity for investors who can take risk, invest and take initiative and the current economical growth provides the right pace for venture funding to innovative projects, said Dr. T Ramasami, Secretary, Department of Science and Technology, Government of India.

New Ventures India’s goal is to achieve at least 15 million dollars worth of investments in 20 sustainable and green businesses by 2008. These include areas of green building materials, energy efficiency products and services, renewable energy and water products, said Deikun.

CII - Godrej GBC aims at creating India as one of the global leaders in green businesses and India has leadership potential in green technology in the cement, paper, green buildings and renewable energy sector, said S Raghupathy, Senior Director and Head CII - Sohrabji Godrej Green Business Center (Godrej GBC).

Dr. Mor is a visionary in this area. In Deeshaa, our team had interacted with him at different times and he spearheaded the entry of ICICI bank in the Micro finance and rural banking areas. This will be the new growth area for ICICI.

The Green Wave is spreading in all directions and India has great potential in this area.