World is Green

Taking from where the Nytimes suggested the increase in public transport usage in America, Krugman says that:

But … as of 2005, only 4.7 percent of American workers took mass transit to work. So even a 10% surge in mass transit ridership would take only around half a percent of drivers off the road.

The point isn’t that nothing can be done — it’s just that serious reductions in driving would require a lot of long-term rearrangement of the way we live. It will come — but not quickly.

More on comparisons between, US, Canada and Europe,

A tale of three cities

What’s more, as far as I can make out from the data, a lot more Canadians than Americans (as a percentage of the population) have switched to public transit over the past year; because the system is there, they have more flexibility.

All in all, this comparison is a reason not to believe apocalyptic warnings about the long-run effects of energy scarcity: there’s a lot of substitution possible. America’s main problem is that we have a capital stock — cars, public infrastructure, and housing — designed for dirt-cheap oil. And the transition may be nasty.

MIT Class Calculates Carbon Footprint of “The Man” | Wired Science from Wired.com

The MIT class, in a paper (pdf) to be presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Electronics and the Environment, estimated that no American, even the homeless and itinerant Buddhist monks, could get their total “share” of energy usage below 130 gigajoules, which is more than twice the global average, and directly correlated with carbon footprint.

That’s because the basic infrastructure of the United States including police, roads, libraries, courts and the military were allocated equally to all citizens of the country. Thus, even if one’s personal consumption in terms of purchased products and lifestyle were minimal, he or she would still bear their share of the systemic carbon load, according to the methodology of this study. In common terms, each and every U.S. resident is carbon-heavier other countries’ citizens.

This is the real issue that needs to be addressed.

With major corporations working on their Sustainability strategies, the top universities are not behind. Harvard has a dedicated program working for the last 7+ years where they have created one of the best university managed environmetal programs.

Stanford has now entered this in a big way. With their original program starting in 2001, they have recently launched the “Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building on March 4″. The new building is called Y2E2 and it “is projected to use roughly half the energy and 90 percent less potable water for fixtures than a typical building of its size.” The buildings uses “an array of sustainable features that fall under five categories: load reduction, passive systems, active systems, energy recovery and on-site generation. These five approaches are expected to slash the building’s power consumption by more than half.”

Interestingly, this initiative is part of ‘The Stanford Challenge” which is a 5 year $4.3 billion fund raising campaign to work on this century’s most pressing global challenges. The idea is to create a mulit-disciplinary environment for the academics to work together to create solutions to this complex issue. They have already raised $3.4 billion towards this.

In a significant new development, Bank of America has decided to come open with its cost of carbon for evaluating coal powered plants.

Bank of America says it has decided to start factoring a cost of carbon-dioxide emissions into its decisions about whether to underwrite debt for new coal-fired plants. Specifically, the bank says it anticipates a federal cap that would require a utility to pay between $20 and $40 for every ton of CO2 its power plants emit. Today in Europe, which already has imposed caps, a permit to emit a ton of CO2 is trading at about $29.

The Australia hosted APEC summit in Sydney has come to an end with 21 world leaders agreeing to “aspirational targets” for cutting down greenhouse gases, and this non-binding agreement is called the “Sydney Declaration”.

Even though condemned by some as lacking any strict targets I think the declaration is meaningful. Considering the scale of change required it is not easy to convince 21 countries to do anything, especially international co-operation on uncertain effects 75 years into the future.

The declaration has the following actions:

In summary, and without prejudice to commitments in other fora, we have decided to:
• highlight the importance of improving energy efficiency by working towards achieving an APEC-wide regional aspirational goal of a reduction in energy intensity of at least 25 per cent by 2030 (with 2005 as the base year);
• work to achieve an APEC-wide aspirational goal of increasing forest cover in the region by at least 20 million hectares of all types of forests by 2020 – a goal which if achieved would store approximately 1.4 billion tonnes of carbon, equivalent to around 11 per cent of annual global emissions (in 2004);
• establish an Asia-Pacific Network for Energy Technology (APNet) to strengthen collaboration on energy research in our region particularly in areas such as clean fossil energy and renewable energy sources;
• establish an Asia-Pacific Network for Sustainable Forest Management and Rehabilitation to enhance capacity building and strengthen information sharing in the forestry sector; and
• further measures in trade in environmental goods and services, aviation transport, alternative and low carbon energy uses, energy security, the protection of marine biological resources, policy analysis capabilities and a co-benefit approach.

It has for the first time made possible for China and the US to agree to some targets and importantly, to work under the current United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC); thus not creating another rival framework. (Incidentally, China played a major role in this)

John Howard’s experience in the last decade in managing Australia’s greenhouse gases through agri-management has provided the impetus for forest cover targets. In fact, the Stern review has suggested that forestry management (afforestation and reducing deforestation) is a good way to tackle climate change. Considering the costs of changing current economic systems, in the short term this is a valid strategy.

The effort on improving energy intensity is a good one. Even though this may not ultimately reduce actual consumption it will improve the efficiency of all countries involved. The importance of trade of economic and social development is well known. These principles are being supported in the declaration.

This declaration is also a good step forward because it acknowledges that “differences in economic and social conditions among economies” and that this would mean “differentiated responsibilities”. Also the emphasis on adaptation is important. As Schelling has suggested,

The sooner Malaysia can become like Singapore, the sooner it can worry less about the impact of climate change on health, comfort, and productivity.

In that sense, trade and economic development is the key to adaptation for climate change.

More importantly, Schelling talks about inputs and outputs.

One striking contrast between NATO and the Kyoto Protocol deserves emphasis: the difference between “inputs” and “outputs,” or actions and results. NATO nations argued about what they should do, and commitments were made to actions. What countries actually did — raise and train troops; procure equipment, ammunition, and supplies; and deploy these assets geographically — could be observed, estimated, and compared. But results — such as how much each NATO nation’s actions contributed to deterring the Warsaw Pact — could not be remotely approximated.

The Sydney declaration takes a small step towards “inputs” — energy intensity, forest cover, trade barriers, clean technology — and this makes it a valid strategy as it is not possible to guarantee the exact emission reduction (outputs) in 10-15 years.

Overall, I think that the Sydney declaration is a good step forward in tackling climate change.

Thomas Friedman writes about the new Save A Watt proposal from the CEO of Duke Energy, Jim Rogers.

 Mr. Rogers’s proposal is based on three simple principles. The first is that the cheapest way to generate clean, emissions-free power is by improving energy efficiency. Or, as he puts it, “The most environmentally sound, inexpensive and reliable power plant is the one we don’t have to build because we’ve helped our customers save energy.”

Second, we need to make energy efficiency something that is as “back of mind” as energy usage. If energy efficiency depends on people remembering to do 20 things on a checklist, it’s not going to happen at scale.

Third, the only institutions that have the infrastructure, capital and customer base to empower lots of people to become energy efficient are the utilities, so they are the ones who need to be incentivized to make big investments in efficiency that can be accessed by every customer.

As Rogers explains, “Energy efficiency is the ‘fifth fuel’ — after coal, gas, renewables and nuclear,” and it is important that a incentivized plan like the ‘Save a Watt’ proposal is implemented. Some of the highest pay back gains in energy will come from energy efficiency. For more on this check out Negawatts vs Megawatts.

Marc Gunther profiles the sustainability consultants GreenOrder who work with Fortune 500 companies creating business value from a sustainability point of view.

GreenOrder works with GE, GM (Charts, Fortune 500) and BP (Charts). New clients call all the time. That’s a sign, according to Andrew Shapiro, the firm’s 39-year-old founder, that sustainability is on its way to becoming “a core part of how businesses think about everything
they do.”

“This green revolution today is as transformative as the digital revolution was 10 years ago,” Shapiro says. “That’s the opportunity that lies in front of us.”

…

“Now it’s really about growing the top line,” Shapiro says. “How do you create the next Toyota Prius? How do you create the next Whole Foods? Look at our clients. They’re so diverse. That tells you something.”

…

Green business guru Joel Makower, a publisher, writer and consultant who has worked with GreenOrder, says: “What’s helped GreenOrder succeed is that they’ve helped companies understand this is about creating business value, not simply being less bad.”

In his Sapientia, a daily newsletter, Keith Hudson tackles some of the toughest questions facing us with a depth and understanding generally un-common. This time he tackles the 4th strategic dialogue between China and the US.

Excerpts from today’s, DAILY QUOTE 471:

…what of global warming? This is already the major concern of Western European countries. But so far there isn’t the faintest scintilla of evidence that either America or China is yet persuaded that man-made carbon dioxide is the major cause of it. It may be that industrial growth is of such huge importance to both countries that they are in ostrich-like denial about any possibility of cramping their style.

It may also be the case that, because some very eminent climatologists still have doubts about the man-made cause of global warming, politicians and administrators are waiting for conclusive evidence. Contrariwise, it may also be that they are indeed already convinced, but that the likely higher sea levels, swamping of seacoast cities, ecological adjustments, human migrations and so forth are judged to be economically bearable while the era of cheap oil and gas reaches its peak during the next 40 years or so. After then it may be calculated that world-wide economic growth will be forced to decline as we move into much more expensive mined-coal or highly expensive solar technologies in order to generate electricity or make transportation fuels.

Some economists — and eminent ones, too — certainly believe that any money likely to be spent on reducing carbon dioxide emissions would be better spent — at least at present and the foreseeable future — on other matters, such as raising the educational standards of all countries.

My own view is that senior administrators in both America and China probably believe that anthropogenic carbon dioxide is making some contribution to global warming even if there are other more fundamental but as yet unknown climatological changes taking place. Furthermore, that there are insufficient energy and other resources in the world that will allow anything more than a fraction of the world population to even approximate to the way of life of, say, half of Americans, half of Western Europeans, most of the Japanese and the middle-class in the coastline provinces of China now enjoy.

All this is quite apart from global warming. Whether this continues or not, the world has already reached its maximum of food production due to freshwater constraints. Furthermore, as noted in a recent Sapientia posting, there is strong evidence from several research groups that there are sufficient minority metal resources of a crucial nature — such as uranium or germanium — to take all the countries of the world into the advanced technologies and the way of life that some in the West (and the coastline of China) already enjoy.

Stanford Graduate School of Business hosts the Centre for Social Innovation which aims to “inspire and educate social innovators, providing knowledge and ideas that strengthen the capacity of current and future leaders to champion social change”

The Centre shares its knowledge through the Social Innovation Review and the Social Conversations Podcasts. The podcasts provides debates and discussions on some of the important emerging themes in the social innovation area.

In the latest podcast, Eric Nee the co-host of the Social Innovation Conversations, discusses the growing Clean tech industry.

The internet boom was, in many ways, insane and wasteful. However, it was also rational and highly productive. What the boom did was kick-start an entire industry by bringing money and talent from around the world to an environment where doing something risky and even crazy was okay.

Today, we have the clean tech revolution. It hasn’t reached the frenzy of the internet boom, but it is gathering steam. Stanford University engineering students are flocking to courses on solar energy. Energy companies are setting up research centers in the San Francisco Bay Area. Venture capital firms have added solar energy and biofuel startups to their portfolios. And talent from around the world is once again flocking to startups.

There are even signs that investments in clean technology are getting a bit crazy—and this fact is a good sign. There are two companies, Planktos and Climos, which have an innovative and controversial (some say crazy) way to rid the atmosphere of excess carbon dioxide. Their plan is to grow vast fields of plankton out in the middle of the ocean that would ingest carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sink to the bottom of the sea. Planktos already has a 115-foot research vessel out in the Pacific experimenting with the process of growing carbon-eating plankton.

If you are at all interested in the clean tech revolution, you’ll want to listen to the two panel discussions we now have on tap—dubbed Climate of Capital Change. These discussions include a number of people who are involved in the clean tech industry—including venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, engineers, and consultants. One of them is Dan Whaley, the founder and CEO of Climos, who interestingly enough was also involved in the internet boom, having founded Waiters on Wheels and Get-There.com.

Check out the related podcasts.

The Climate of Capital Change: Social Entrepreneurs
The Climate of Capital Change: Funding a Cleaner World

GreenBiz.com reports on a SmartMarket report released by McGraw-Hill and produced in partnership with Siemens Building Technologies.

“Today’s corporate leaders are already very conscious of using green practices when considering new facilities, and they expect green building to have an increasing impact in the future,” said Brad Haeberle, director of marketing for Siemens Building Technologies. “Moreover, they believe that green building is in their company’s best interests, not only for the clear economic benefits, but for the market differentiation and competitive advantage.”According to the study’s findings, 18 percent of the corporate leaders surveyed are in a position to transform the market — 15 percent view sustainability as a competitive advantage and the other 3 percent are actually driving their entire businesses through this value-driven lens.

Over the next three years, more companies see themselves as entering this top tier, with nearly a third of the sample aiming to be market leaders in sustainability. The report found that by early 2009, but perhaps sooner, American businesses will have reached a tipping point in embracing green as a cornerstone of their corporate philosophy. At that point, 82 percent of the companies will have greened at least 16 percent of their building stock.

And over the weekend, the CERES annual conference, Advancing Sustainable Prosperity, in Boston conducted a survey. The CERES conference is based on the premise that “businesses can use their market-economy power for environmental good, which at this year’s conference largely means blunting climate disruption, while making an honest profit in the process.”

According to the “Advancing Sustainable Prosperity” survey conducted by Ceres last week at its annual conference in Boston, direct action by government and corporations are the best ways to improve the sustainability of the global economy.

Nearly 80 percent of the nearly 300 respondents cited climate change as the biggest global sustainability challenge today, while an overwhelming majority — 90 percent — of those surveyed said greenhouse gas emission reductions and improved energy efficiency are the most important sustainability issue that corporations need to address in 2007. Two-thirds of the respondents — 67 percent — cited renewable energy technology as the technology with the biggest opportunity for achieving sustainable prosperity.

“Achieving sustainable prosperity will require integrating environmental and social challenges into corporate strategies and capital markets so that the global economy and the global community can flourish hand in hand,” said Ceres president Mindy S. Lubber.