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The Clean Air Act was originally enacted in 1970 as part of a host of changes acknowledging that unregulated business practices were creating serious health and environmental issues.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.

A flare for the unusable

by Dave Rochlin - from www.ClimatePath.org

I recently attended a California Climate Action Reserve (CAR) event at the EPA building in Sacramento. The CAR is a major certifier of carbon projects, originally forestry related, and now from many other sectors. I left the event feeling that their exuberance for listing anything with a carbon benefit is a bit disturbing, making heroes out of some of the worst contributors to global warming, including intensive cattle farms, trucking firms, and landfills. In an ironic twist of logic, the only thing that the CAR turned their noses up at is renewable energy, since they expect that power producers will be required to clean up their acts.

Let's take a look at landfills. Landfills create methane, a potent greenhouse gas. So potent in fact that that 1 ton of Methane is the equivalent of roughly 20 tons of CO2. It turns out that capturing this methane is not particularly difficult. Some landfills are starting to either capture and use the gas for power generation, or to simply flare it, converting the methane into a much less harmful waste emission. Subsidies and carbon finance are chasing this change, since methane capture is highly measurable, and relatively easy to do. Project originators are finding this an easy and lucrative way to create carbon credits

While some enthusiastically endorse carbon land fill projects, what does this tell us about the commitment in the US to really doing something about global warming? Before 1970, factories discharged sludge with reckless abandon into the public waterways. After some well publicized cases of rivers literally catching fire, the EPA was formed to protect public health and the environment from pollution. Paying factories not to pollute was not the idea....it was to regulate industry from polluting the commons for the sake of higher profits. (It is your sludge, you deal with it!) How exactly is methane different from sludge? Where is the standard that requires landfills to clean up after themselves? When landfills are allowed to release methane and not flare, it hurts the environment while making garbage artificially cheap. This leads to more garbage, and more methane.

The Climate Action Reserve does not believe landfill regulation is forthcoming. And Co-generating power from landfill methane deserves support as both an alternative energy source and climate change reducer. But since the impact of landfill methane is measurable and the avoidance is easy, minimal capture and flaring requirements should not be optional. Unfortunately, a cap and trade system will codify business as usual, creating a permanent standard based on minimal regulation of landfills. Let's not celebrate or subsidize what should be a basic requirement of doing business: We need to hold polluters accountable.

"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.

Tough lessons for Dell

In June of 2007, Dell Chairman and CEO Michael Dell set out to make his computer company the greenest technology company on the planet, through a variety of initiatives including tree planting, energy efficiency, recycling and offsetting.

By August of 2008, Dell declared itself to be carbon neutral. The Wall Street Journal decided to investigate this claim, and their damning criticism highlights the many challenges facing firms and individuals seeking a carbon neutral path.

In calculating their footprint, a lack of clarity and standards around what to include led the Journal to conclude that Dell was missing the boat. A great interactive graphic is available here , and a static graphic is shown below. First off, Dell should be applauded for their transparency in the process; it shows their commitment. But what should Dell include in their total carbon emissions? Our methodology would say that to be totally carbon neutral, Dell should force their suppliers to deliver carbon neutral (part of the a product input) , but that users should take responsibility of energy used to run their Dell products...not Dell. Whatever the answer, clearly explaining the methodology is important so that the rest of use can choose to agree or disagree with their claims.

In offsetting, Dell fell into some obvious traps in choosing how to offset. They ended up supporting projects without clear additionality, and failed to take a personal interest in where the money was going. The wind projects supported clearly did not result in any less GHG...their wind partners reported that they certainly would have built the wind farms regardless of whether they had been able to sell RECs. This means that Dell's money had no impact on the climate, it only enriched the Windmill operators. This is unfrotunate, since there are plenty of projects for which this is not the case. ClimatePath wants to create a more direct and transparent connection between projects and ofsetters, and the ClimatePath Ecologic Fund exists to make sure that credits and credit issuers deliver, and avoid this sort of commercial transaction with questionable benefit to the planet.

In this instance, Dell learned the hard way that carbon credits are no more of a commodity than are microprocessors: There is a difference.

Be green and save green

Note: This first appeared in Dave and Katy's December "Green and Greener" column .

Dave: Would you make few easy lifestyle changes in 2009 if we offered you $500? There's an old saying that "a New Year's resolution is something that goes in one year and out the other." So in lieu of resolutions, we're kicking off the new year and our new monthly feature with a more direct approach: Cash.

Okay, we aren't actually sending out checks. The money comes from savings off your 2009 gasoline and PG & E bills. But a dollar saved is a dollar earned, right? PG&E reports that a typical residential customer uses 540 kWh and 45 gas therms each month, which adds up to $1700/year. The average Lamorinda home is anything but typical, and most of us probably spend $3000 or more on gas and electric each year. Add to that the fifteen hundred gallons of gas most of us will buy next year, which will cost another $4,000. That's $7,000 we'll each spend on energy in 2009.

Katy: Hey! Speak for yourself. My bill is about a third of that. And, let me interject that aside from saving money, you're helping fight global warming. A $500 reduction in energy use eliminates roughly three tons of carbon (CO2) emissions. C02 contributes to climate change, and the average American produces close to twenty tons per year, so a three-ton personal reduction can make a big difference in helping the planet.

Dave: Exactly! So my personal favorite starts at the washing machine. Procter & Gamble, the folks who make Tide laundry detergent, reported that if they could get everybody in th e U.S. to wash clothes in full loads in cold water, it would reduce total U.S. energy consumption by over 3%. Your share would save you as much as $100 per year.

Katy: Hot water is typically at the top of the list in home energy consumption. Surprisingly, almost all of the energy used in washing clothes comes from heating the water. Of course, using a clothes line instead of the dryer can save you another $75/year...

Dave: Whoa, let's not go back to the 1930s! Plus my wife thinks I treat the entire house as a clothes line.

Katy: That's hardly the 1930s, drama king. I'm just saying; open a window now and then instead of using the AC. And when it's hot, hang some jeans or towels over the railing. Use the weather to your advantage. Plus, my jeans last like five times longer.

Dave: Fine, fine. What about compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs)?

Katy: Big savings there...but you have to invest a little to get it. Putting in a dozen CFLs can reduce your electricity consumption by 5%. That's good for another $100/year. If you replace all of your bulbs, you could save as much as $300. Get in the habit of turning them off when you leave a room, and you'll save even more!

Dave: Well even though it is costing me money, we've just been replacing with CFL's as the old ones burn out. I just can't bring myself to change a lightbulb that is still working....frankly, even the burnt out ones don't get changed right away.

Katy: At a minimum you should replace the ones that get the most use, like your porch light and anything in the kitchen. The energy savings are well worth it.

Dave: Now about gasoline. Even with lower gas prices, there is no joy paying at the pump. Keeping your tires inflated can save you 40 gallons a year. And weight matters as well. If you pull the sporting goods, snow chains, assorted beach chairs, and books out of your car, that could save another 25 gallons. So get that junk out of your trunk! The two together put another $200 in your pocket.

Katy: I might also point out that a lot of us are near Bart. But when you need to drive, the real cost savings comes from slowing down. Gas mileage decreases rapidly at speeds above 55 mph. If you do a lot of freeway driving, slowing from 75 to 65 will save at least 100 gallons a year, and an additional ton of CO2. A drive from here to Tahoe would take 20 minutes longer at most.

Dave: I'm pretty sure that the 55 MPH speed limit is why neither Gerald Ford nor Jimmy Carter got more than one term. How about just going smoother on starts and stops?

Katy: Your grasp of presidential politics is truly profound. Smoother starts and stops can definitely help. Estimates vary wildly, but you'll use at least 50 less gallons per year that way. That's another $150.

Dave: Or if you have a teenager in your house, it could be worth as much as $50,000.

Katy: I'll take your word for it on that one. Well, let's sum it up. How to save over $500 in 2009:

• Use cold water for your laundry ($75)


• Start replacing conventional lightbulbs with CFLS ($100)


• Keep your tires inflated and your car free of junk ($200)


• Stop and start smoothly when you drive ($150)
  

This is a good start. Next time we can talk about how to use part of that $500 savings to go from a smaller footprint to carbon neutral.

Dave: That will be my resolution!