Green Economy and A Moving Van

By Dave Rochlin - originally posted on care2.com

Did he or didn't he? We'll probably never know the true story behind Van Jones' signature on a 911 conspiracy petition that ultimately caused him to step down as green jobs czar. Politics is a dirty business (made dirtier by the internet) and he certainly is not the first or the last victim of partisanship. (Nor will he quietly vanish from the public spotlight!)

The real question is whether his passion for reinventing our economy so that tackling climate change actually creates opportunity will be a victim as well. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times did a profile on him in 2007 which featured a great quote summing up his position:

"The green economy has the power to deliver new sources of work, wealth and health to low-income people - while honoring the Earth. If you can do that, you just wiped out a whole bunch of problems. We can make what is good for poor black kids good for the polar bears and good for the country."

To that I would add that we also have a chance to solve problems in the developing world. While we tend to focus on the sky high average US footprint and the 'westernization' of successful economies (cars, televisions, appliances) leading to climate threats, there are a host of solutions to deep rural poverty issues that can be beneficiaries of action on the climate.

Imagine a future where we divert some of the $600 million we spend daily on oil imports (and $100 million per day on coal) to producing energy by capturing the wind, sun, tides, and heat. Imagine also trading out energy purchases for smarter design and construction of buildings, machines, cookstoves in Africa, and even cities. This future - where energy is a clean product rather than polluting resource controlled by a few large oil companies and countries, where we replace thoughtless disposable consumption with a skilled service and manufacturing sector, and where we practice natural capitalism (valuing ecological systems) - is an exciting and energizing counterweight to the normal doom and gloom surrounding the climate change discussion.

As Van Jones has said "Dr. King didn't get famous giving a speech that said, I have a complaint." Let's keep the dream alive.

Photo copyright psd at flickr.com

Not Just About the Bike

By Dave Rochlin - Originally posted on care2.com

Probably the coolest thing I saw in Amsterdam a couple of years ago was a multi-story parking garage at the train station...for bikes. Bikes are everywhere; they have their own protected lanes, and at rush hour, they rule. Car and bus drivers have to deal with it. It's amazing how many people will adopt an earth friendly practice like riding a bike when it is easy.

When I was in Paris last month (and yep, I'm offsetting the flight by supporting a Ugandan fair trade forestry project via ClimatePath), I noticed a different approach to encouraging biking - it's called "Velib". Velib is basically a Zip Car for bikes. You can pick up a bike at one of 1,400 parking kiosks around town, and drop it at another. I love the concept, but Paris streets remain scary and not very friendly to bike riders. Until that changes, I doubt this program will make much of a dent in traffic in the city of lights.

Public infrastructure change is crucial in supporting a lower carbon economy. You want less driving? Stop spending on roads and start subsidizing rail and expanding better coordinated public transportation. (Paris has an amazing, integrated rail and metro system, which costs $1.50 to ride.) More recycling? It's less about the CRV and more about making it easy to drop that bottle or can in a separate bin. (Paris scores low on that one.) In my home town, battery recycling went way up when a local community group organized drop off points and made it painless.

It's exciting to see some of the focus of the stimulus funds directed at smart grids, energy efficiency and other projects...but I wonder if a lack of shovel-ready infrastructure projects that create a permanent greenshift in our communities is a lost opportunity. The lesson is probably to be realistic about what it will really take to transform your community, but to still dream big.

The UN Says Trees Matter....Really?

By Dave Rochlin - Originally posted on care2.com

With all of the billions of dollars being invested in clean technology, carbon reduction and smart grids, it's amazing that forests have been largely overlooked as a source of carbon capture and storage. As a new report by the United Nations Environment Program points out: "forests...have been doing the job in a tried and tested way for millennia." Unfortunately, when forests are cleared via slash and burn, that carbon is unlocked. The UN estimates that 20% of global emissions come from releasing carbon stored in forests, tundra and other ecosystems.

The UNEP report comes at a pretty significant time. There has been a lot of ongoing debate leading up the next round of climate talks in Copenhagen about the role of forests and land use in reducing carbon levels. Establishing baselines, proving that money directly creates a carbon benefit (aka additionality), insuring that they don't burn and modeling ecosystems is pretty complex, and has made forest preservation an outsider when it comes to cap and trade and carbon finance.

I have written about REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) before, and the idea that forests have a carbon value that can be quantified and monetized. An acre of tropical forest can store 100 tons or more of carbon, and UNEP estimates that we are losing at least 20 million acres a year. They also point out that a number of other natural systems, from peatlands to savanna are under similar pressure. The greenhouse gas math is scary. Population growth and the need for income is driving a lot of the destruction, and providing an economic solution, for example by paying indigenous groups to care for forests and set them aside, rather than farm them, is an elegant way to 'unlock the value' of the forest land without unlocking the carbon. ClimatePath has been working with several groups that are using the voluntary carbon markets to do just that.

I have to say, it is a sign of how far decoupled and out of balance our global economy has become that the idea of protecting forests and other natural ecosystems as a way of fighting climate change is open for discussion. While the true 'cost of carbon' is open for debate, can you picture a world without forests? Aside from the carbon, deforestation is often irreversible, and deadly for the plants and animals that call specific forests home. For these reasons alone, let's err on the side of saving them.

Still Inconvenient?

Posted by Dave Rochlin at www.climatepath.org

In what is being considered a major reversal of years of government policy, the EPA recently acknowledged the need to regulate greenhouse gas emissions to combat global warming.

The EPA concluded that the continued growth in greenhouse gas emissions "endangers the public health and welfare of current and future generations." Two years ago, the Supreme Court ruled the EPA had the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. And now the EPA has the impetus.

The Clean Air Act was originally enacted in 1970 as part of a host of changes acknowledging that unregulated business practices were creating serious health and environmental issues. In the case of air pollution, leaded gas was the most pressing problem, and was continuing to grow despite knowledge of the harm caused by lead. Over time, the law was modified to take on other issues, such as CFC-induced ozone depletion, another environmental disaster which started as a simple business decision. So limiting the six primary greenhouse gasses is a no brainer right?

Maybe not. Our world runs on activities which produce GHGs – from growing food, to producing electricity, to filling up landfills. We have resisted efforts to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases for years, out of concern for the economy. Substitutes are proving to be a long time coming, which has us stuck trying to somehow both acknowledge and ignore the inconvenient truth that we are making permanent and unhealthy changes to our planet.

The latest example is the recent decision to uphold that the Endangered Species Act and GHG emissions should not be linked. The endangered species in question is polar bears, and the evidence is pretty unequivocal that their habitat is in decline thanks to global warming. Even Disney – in their latest movie Earth – makes the obvious connection. Refusal to act on GHG emissions to save Polar Bears has nothing to do with questions about cause and effect, and everything to do with the costs of moving to a relatively carbon free world. It would simply be too much of a shock to the system to act at the speed and level that the act would require. This is a devastating probable death sentence for a magnificent animal, and highlights the tension between pragmatism and speed in the fight against climate change.

While congress, industry, academia, and consumers debate how much change is needed how fast, we at ClimatePath continue to advocate for both speed AND pragmatism. We firmly believe that this notion of a “trade off “ is false. Want to cut your emissions in half? You can reduce your energy consumption by 25% simply by following the many conservation actions we have listed on our site. And by the way, this will probably save you $500-$1,000/year. If you take just 10% of that savings and put it against offset projects – such as the reforestation, energy efficiency, and alternative energy projects we feature – your carbon footprint will be half of what it was. Want to have a bigger impact? Convince 10 other people to do the same. We don’t have to wait while our institutions debate at what cost polar bears are worth saving.

Whose Footprint?

Posted by Dave Rochlin - Climatepath.org

We just finished a study on Tweeting – (definition: the act of posting on Twitter) that calculated the carbon footprint of twittering at 21.5 pound per year. We decided to offset the 2009 tweeting of our followers as a 'thank you' gift for earth day. Our concept for tweet footprinting is supply side: If you post a twitter, people read it, and so that activity should be counted as yours. (You can learn more by clicking here: )

But you could just as easily build a demand side argument. In other words, if you agreed to follow a tweeter, the act of following should be yours. The difficult thing to avoid is double counting…either the tweeter or the tweetee (is that a word?) needs to be the one accountable.

McAfee just did a study of their own calculating the carbon footprint of unwanted email (aka spam.) As with twittering, the largest component is from the energy used by recipients (from reading the things.) The difference in this case of course is that it is spam…you didn’t ask for it! Being asked to account for the footprint of spam would be kind of like someone else burning down your house and then you being asked to offset the carbon from the fire.

So how to decide who should get the footprint? The whole point of measuring and offsetting carbon is to create a link between action and climate. Someone somewhere is taking an action that produced greenhouse gasses, and they probably aren’t considering the environmental costs when they do it.

Using this guiding principal, spammers should offset the spam footprint, tweeters should offset tweeting, wineries should offset everything that goes into making a bottle (but leave the CO2 from the act of chilling and drinking it to the happy customer) and clients should offset the climate cost of their lawyers flying to see them. Matching behaviors and costs leads to change.

Of course everyone can use a nudge now and then (for example, Maytag could ask you to offset the energy of your washing machine) but that is an idea for another blog!

Where does a business footprint start and stop?

Posted by Dave Rochlin - ClimatePath (www.climatepath.org)

We have been busy working on a footprinting exercise for a brewery, and it brings up many of the recurring questions about the scope of carbon emissions that should be attributed to an organization. And I thought beer is supposed to be fun! Some quick observations:

Counting for the purpose of measuring vs. mitigating (via offsetting and conservation) are two different things.
From an accounting perspective, if each entity accounts for their inputs, then 100% of the carbon (or it's equivalent) source is inventoried. For a brewery for example, the beer maker could count the brewing as their footprint, a bottle manufacturer covers the glass, a farmer the hops, and the paper maker the cardboard.

For declaring carbon neutrality or even carbon progress, however, this number leaves the brewery far short of the real impact of their operations. The end product - a bottle of beer - is actually a combination of the inputs, and the carbon footprint should reflect the total. When a consumer buys a beer that is labeled as carbon neutral, they expect the grain, glass, and packaging to be covered.

If the brewery's direct carbon input is 100,000 tonnes, then a 10,000 ton reduction would sound like an impressive 10% improvement. If all inputs actually add up to 300,000 tonnes, however, it is a far less impressive 3%. From a cap and trade perspective, this becomes a critical issue.

There is direct pain from indirect emissions
The guidelines around what gets counted upstream are surprisingly loose. The Greenhouse Gas Protocol , which is also used by the Climate Action Registry refer to scope 3 (indirect emissions) in this way:

Scope 3 is optional, but it provides an opportunity to be innovative in GHG management. Companies may want focus on accounting for and reporting those activities that are relevant to their business and goals, and for which they have reliable information. Since companies have discretion over which categories they choose to report, scope 3 may not lend itself well to comparisons across companies. This section provides an indicative list of scope 3 categories and includes case studies on some of the categories.

Encouraging innovative accounting? Yikes! One coffee study I have been reviewing shows that almost 50% of all emissions for the company result from the production and transport of fertilizer (not the use, but the actual production.) This input can easily by overlooked, which not only instantly cuts the firm's footprint in half, but also removes incentives to use organic and other techniques to reduce fertilizer dependency.

Good intentions are not enough
Almost without exception, flying is a pain point when it comes to footprinting, and most businesses (and individuals) would prefer to leave it out of their footprint. I was recently at a fair trade conference, and many of the attendees regularly fly to Africa, South America, and/or Asia to meet with the groups that they buy from. Few think to offset the travel, and most would consider themselves green and "low carbon," as well as socially progressive businesses. But four trips to Africa could mean 50 Tons of carbon, and for a small business, this actually puts them on par with traditional manufacturers. Too often green efforts fall short of real impact, but with carbon, the numbers don't lie. ClimatePath encourages full transparency in footprint reporting, and you should to.

"Eco-balancing your life"

Note: This first appeared in Dave and Katy's January "Green and Greener" Column

Dave: I was making the holiday party rounds right after our last column ran, and quite a few people commented on my self described "lazy environmentalist" tag. Apparently, it really resonated. Several friends said "hey...that’s me too!" Most of us WANT to do the right thing, but why does it have to be so hard to do?

Katy: Assuming it's hard is the first problem. There are about a thousand easy tips that you can try, and see if they work for you.

Dave: Such as?

Katy: How about using a power strip to fully turn off your TV and game systems, or turning off the heater and opening your windows when it's 73 in January!

Dave: OK I’ll concede that point, but have you ever tried to use the bus? Also, a lot of us have to schlep kids around. And I am sure you noticed that I stopped biking to work about the time the thermometer started hitting 40. Sometimes you just need to drive. Where do you draw the line?

Katy: We all draw the line differently. And that's fine - the key is to just keep trying new things and finding the right ways to conserve that work for you. For example, when I finally got into a groove of bringing my canvas bags and reusing my produce bags at the grocery store, I found I preferred it. They are more comfortable to carry, and the people at Whole Foods are always thanking me for doing it. I like it MORE than using new bags each time. But it took trying it a few times for that to happen.

Dave: Yeah...I get the guilt of watching everyone else in Trader Joe's load up their canvas. I do have to say, at TJ's they pack those paper bags tight. Sometimes I think they just want to make you squirm for using paper in the first place.

I am not against trying new things, and constant improvement is a good thing. But even you haven't gotten your emissions down to zero.

Katy: No one is going to get to zero anytime soon. I try to avoid that all-or-nothing thinking; it sabotages me every time (and is why most diets fail, right?). So my approach is to keep trying to reduce in all the ways I can, see what sticks, and use carbon offsets for the rest.

Offsetting lets you support greenhouse gas reducing projects around the world while retaining some flexibility in your own life. They're crucial to fighting global warming in the short-term, while efficiencies and renewable energy are still in development.

Dave: It's a good solution for airline travel in particular. You and I both fly fairly often, and all that flying is pretty tough on the planet, but I don't see Toyota making any hybrid airplanes.

Katy: I'm pretty sure you don't see Toyota making airplanes at all.

Dave: So we need to find another way to make up for all that carbon that jet engines release on our behalf. Offsetting has been practiced at a national level for a while in Europe and other places where they have set voluntary emissions targets. The way it works is that by supporting things like forests or energy efficiency projects elsewhere, you make up for what you ‘have to’ emit at home. But I am sure many people reading this would ask "why should I as an individual do it?"

Katy: Well...I hate it when people spill their drinks on BART or leave their dog's waste on the trail. The degradation of common spaces and resources affect all of us, and we all need to do our part to care for and preserve them. Climate change is this same concept on a much larger scale. We all have to take responsibility for our impact on it.

Dave: My pet peeve is people who leave dirty towels lying on the floor in the locker room at the gym …..I guess the earth is the biggest locker room of them all.

Katy: I wouldn't call it a locker room yet, but we're headed for a hot and stinky future if we don't take action.

Dave: Well I hope it's not too late! Anyway...I love the idea that when I fly, drive, or even just watch a movie, I can still make that activity 'carbon neutral'. And yes, I know that I need to reduce first.

Katy: You're learning. For our readers, if you want to see what sort of offsets are out there, our website (www.ClimatePath.org) has a variety of projects listed. You can also calculate your footprint from flying, driving, and your home, and learn more about conservation and offsetting for yourself.