Wow. Try convincing the zoning regulators to give the OK for more density let alone allow beer cans, car tires and water bottles be your tools of choice to produce thermal mass and energy-independent housing.
Not a chance you could pull it off unless you’re renegade architect Michael Reynolds, Garbarge Warrior.” Read the rest of this entry »
The European Union’s heavy industry carbon dioxide emissions during 2007 reached around 1.914 billion metric tons according to data released Wednesday. The numbers were 93% complete, because some of the 10,500 companies registered on the Europe’s carbon trading platform had failed to meet the March 31 submission deadline. Prices on the secondary carbon market rallied on the news Wednesday. The price of benchmark European Union Allowances (EUAs) futures increased 88 cents, a 3.9% rise.
The numbers are important for traders on the European Climate Exchange, who take guidance from the level of actual carbon emissions to gauge what demand for offsets is likely to be.
The data indicate there’s been a 1.1% rise in CO2 emissions according to Oslo-based Point Carbon. The release of the data marks the start of the second phase of the European Trading Scheme, a market-based cap-and-trade system which has been going for three years already.
The British capital markets watchdog, the Financial Services Authority, has released a report warning that many emissions trading companies make false claims about their green credentials.
The FSA says that the integrity of the carbon trading market is under threat. The information that carbon emissions traders relay to clients often has a truth content that’s lower than you’d expect. In many cases there’s also no clarity over the regulations involved, a lack of credible data. Investors are also frequently offered climate change related products that are totally unsuitable for their goals. Read the rest of this entry »
Companies involved in offsetting their carbon footprint have access to over twenty tools to calculate their emissions, most of which have been launched in the last year. So far, the voluntary carbon offsetting market is dominated by European players. Reviews of their efforts have not been all too positive, so US companies following in their footsteps do best to avoid the pitfalls.
The main criticism centers on what’s left out of the equation. Companies embarking on greening up their business practices are faced with a daunting task and most go about it the “easy way” at first. There’s the option to simply offset carbons on the Chicago Climate Exchange, the European Climate Exchange or on the newly established NYMEX venture, the Green Exchange. Businesses have access to these exchanges if they wish to reduce their overall greenhouse gas emissions by as little as 1%.
Green collar jobs are rapidly becoming fashionable. The new trend represents a shift to the mainstream of the good old environmentalist approach to life. But what exactly makes a job green? The experts are far from agreed.
Green collar jobs have a magic lure to them. Not only because the people involved in the sector are supposedly making a conscious effort to salvage what’s left of the earth’s natural resources, but also because they’re hoping to drag the ailing economy out of its current quagmire.
The environmentalist visionary Van Jones, who heads up the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, is drawing massive crowds across the country to his speeches about the green sector. He has helped initiate a green jobs program in Oakland and it is in part due to his work that the Presidential candidates have included green collar jobs in their programs.
A climate change summit is taking place March 31st-April 4 in Bangkok. Representatives of over 170 countries are meeting to get a draft accord in place for a successor to the Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012. The deadline to reach a new protocol has been set for a December 2009 meeting in Denmark.
An interim summit held in Japan mid March convened representatives of the world’s top 20 greenhouse gas emitting countries responsible for 80% of the world’s pollution. It appeared that little progress was made. But all countries including the US agreed in Bali that they’d participate in the negotiations to the Kyoto’s successor and that promise was upheld two weeks ago. What was termed a “principle of common but differentiated responsibility” was accepted as a framework for negotiations. In other words, the new pact will bind all countries to various actions.
The Open Skies agreement which deregulates the aviation industries of the US and Europe will come into effect March 30th. But the treaty is undermined by a row over offsetting pollution.
Theoretically the agreement whereby airlines from the US and Europe are allowed to land in any airport on the two continents, should lower flight costs, open up airlines to foreign ownership and the create new flight routes between Europe and the US. But it ain’t happening. All of these targets are obscured in heavy clouds.
Virgin Atlantic, which inaugurated the world’s first biofuel flight a few weeks back, told a recent New York news conference that it doesn’t foresee any progress on Open Skies in the near future. The company hasn’t even chosen any destinations for new flight routes and says this is not in the cards for at least another two years.
I, for one, don’t remember the stagflation of the 1970s.
It was a time when prices were increasing at the gas pump and grocery store, and when the economy sputtered along with little or no growth. Some neighbors saw their wages flatten — or their jobs disappear altogether. Gold, often seen as a barometer of economic confidence, was at an all time high (adjusted for inflation). I was pre-teen in a comfty Detroit suburb with a father who worked at then stalwart, GM, so a roof over my head and food on the table was never a concern.
But here we are today, with Priuses outselling Suburbans. Oil and gold are at all time highs. Things seem far more perplexing, interconnected, global. First, there’s the perception of a housing crunch, even though fretting over a 15 percent decline in home values over the last year or two seems rather odd given the incredible run-up of many homes over the past decade, sometimes by over 100 percent.
Second, the sub-prime mortgage mess has snared many who agreed with greedy lenders that living beyond our means was okay. That more jobs are being outsourced overseas or replaced by fancy machines in this increasingly global marketplace isn’t helping either.
Even if the Federal Reserve or Congress and the Bush Administration do manage to convince the American people that they should keep on spending by splurging with windfall tax refund checks — thus avoiding a recession — the printing presses rolling off fresh greenbacks and mounting debt on a national level could result in the onset of stagflation. Oil, while swinging up and down with the speculator’s bets and value of the dollar, will continue on its upward trajectory reflecting the reality of “peak oil,” the period by which its extraction and refinement will get ever more expensive and difficult. Our economy, and those linked around the world, are based on this fuel and this fuel is largely denominated in US dollars. When the dollar falls in value, the price of a barrel of oil must increase.
So why will ecopreneurial businesses fare any different than all the rest if, in Read the rest of this entry »
All businesses have “variable expenses” related to energy, right?
Not always. There’s nothing in the IRS tax code preventing businesses from investing in renewable energy systems (and energy conservation/efficiency) that allow these businesses to operate more efficiently, sustainably, and green. In fact, often there are tax credits and other incentives to encourage these kinds of investments. Some businesses, like ours, generate a surplus of energy, essentially wiping out energy costs not to mention cutting carbon emissions (more on this another day). Taking such an approach to business, boosts our bottom line profitability.
Around the Summer Solstice every year (this June 20 - 22 in 2008), the Midwest Renewable Energy Association, or MREA, hosts the world’s largest and longest-running “Renewable Energy and Sustainable Living Fair” in Custer, Wisconsin, a fifteen minute drive from Stevens Point in the central part of the state. It’s one of the places where we learned the basics to transform our business, Inn Serendipity, into an independent power producer by harvesting the wind and solar energy with a 10 kW Bergey wind turbine and .7 kW photovoltaic system, respectively. Read the rest of this entry »
What do you think about Whole Foods Market’s plan to bag disposable plastic grocery bags in their 270 stores on this coming Earth Day, April 22? Can corporations on the greener side of the aisle like Whole Foods Market truly put purpose before profit?
I’m voting a cautious “yes.” Maybe the tides are slowly turning when Whole Foods can successfully mix education and advocacy into our routine shopping experiences, from showcasing produce from local family farms to reminding us that how we transport the product home is just as important as what we buy. Bagging plastic bags illustrates that going green and protecting our food system reach beyond the choices we throw in our shopping cart. Like nature, and as we talk about in our book, ECOpreneuring: Putting Purpose and the Planet Before Profits, we need to be mindful of how all our actions integrate and work holistically together. In a country where we pass through the check-out aisle infinitely more times than the voting booth, retailers possess the potential to serve as change agents through their choices and actions.
Let’s not kid ourselves, though. Once again, America is trying to keep pace with the rest of the world. Countries from Ireland to Australia have taken steps to ban plastic bags. Even the Chinese government just banned certain types of plastic bags. Turns out that getting rid of plastic bags reduces harmful effects on wildlife and cuts the need for increasingly more expensive oil. In China’s case, the ban will save 38 million barrels of oil according to the Chicago Tribune. Decrease waste, help the environment and improve the bottom line — now that’s classic ecopreneuring.
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