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Recent Articles
Reframing Cap and Trade
By Peter Fusaro, Founder, Wall Street Green Trading Summit
Cap and Trade has been hijacked, the wind taken out of its sails by climate change skeptics. More specifically, the issue of market-based solutions for addressing environmental problems has been utterly distorted. The truth of the matter is that markets have worked to drive efficient, environmental results.
One of the prime examples of this is the acid rain problem. In the US Northeast, it has been remediated in a cost effective way using environmental financial markets since 1995. The urban ozone (smog) problem has been lessened in 22 states due to the use of markets to reduce nitrous oxide (NOX) emissions since 1999. In fact, in the US today, there are 38 environmental financial markets that remediate environmental problems for air quality and water quality and protect endangered species.
What this means is that it’s time for the issue of cap and trade to be reframed. My argument is that environmental trading is only the facilitator to the implementation of cleaner technology and renewable energy. Cap and trade facilitates scaling of cleaner technologies by generating needed capital. And it has proven to be cost effective and adopted by industry with little violation of the law due to financial sanctions.
8 Steps for Building a Triple Bottom Line Business You Can Sell
By John Warrilow
When it comes to creating a business worth selling, a values-based business is just like any other- it needs to serve a demonstrated need and have a strong financial foundation, to boot. Here are eight steps to put your triple bottom line business on the market and find a willing buyer.
1. Identify a scalable product or service
Scalable products meet three criteria:
- Teachable — you can train people or program technology to deliver them.
- Valuable — your customers want to buy them.
- Repeatable — you can show an acquirer a future stream of income.
Once you’ve picked a product or service that is scalable, document for your employees how to sell and deliver it.
Carbon Markets: Trading to Stop Climate Change
By Elizabeth (Lisa) Zelljadt, Senior Analyst, Point Carbon
Every morning Mike walks into his London office and logs on to the Intercontinental Exchange, where he and most of his colleagues do all their work. He surveys the news for major political developments related to greenhouse gas emissions, then checks current and forward prices of fuels, and throws an eye on the weather. Finally, he sells or buys a few hundred thousand tons…of carbon.
Mike is a carbon trader, one of many financial sector workers who specialize in a commodity that is like pork bellies, scrap metal, or crude oil contracts—but was created entirely by an environmental policy called cap-and-trade.
With all the hype in the news, most people know how cap-and-trade works: regulators set a tonnage limit on the amount of pollution—a cap—that declines over time, and then allocate enough permits to equal the cap. Each permit is worth one metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e). Emissions from all the entities covered by this cap cannot exceed that limit collectively, but on an individual basis, each can cut its carbon output in whatever way works best
A Light in the Dark: The Success of the U.S. Renewable Energy Certificate (REC) Market
By Dan Kalafatas, President, 3Degrees
It is tempting for environmental market advocates (like myself) to gnash their teeth as climate change misinformation and standard Washington gridlock continue to delay passage of climate change legislation that would create a national carbon market. However, in doing so, we are ignoring a bright light amidst the darkness – the stunning growth and impressive success of the U.S. renewable energy certificate (REC) market.
Driven by state Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS), growing individual and organizational voluntary demand for renewable energy, and the development of a widely accepted standard and trusted registries, today’s vibrant and mature REC market is accelerating the development of a renewable energy economy. Perhaps if we are more vocal about the success of the REC market we can build the political support required to pass federal climate change legislation that uses markets to achieve our environmental goals.
How Carbon Markets Can Deliver Local, Sustainable Development Throughout the World
Images courtesy of Kincentricity Social Carbon
By Boyd Cohen, co-founder, Kincentricity Social Carbon
Carbon trading is a $100+ billion global industry driven largely by the regulated markets in Europe, where most of the offset trading is done on the European Union Trading System (EUTS). The primary tool resulting from the Kyoto Accord for generating offsets for the EUTS is the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). CDM is an instrument originally designed to enable countries and companies from the developed world to develop lower-cost, high quality carbon offset projects in developing countries.
While it has arguably succeeded with that goal, it has fallen well short of achieving one of its secondary goals, which is to enable local, sustainable development in the developing world.
Yes, massive new hydroelectric power plants in China create renewable energy sources for their population, but they also have detrimental impacts on local ecosystems and often cause the displacement of thousands of local villagers. Methane capture from an oil refinery in Argentina also can generate sizable amount of offsets for a profit but can easily lack local impact.
SEC Climate Change Guidelines Lead to New Shareholder Resolutions
By Dale Wannen
If recent talk about climate change hasn’t already rattled every CEO’s corporate cage, then yesterday’s news regarding shareholder resolutions should do the trick. It was announced during a phone-based news conference today that investors filed a record 95 climate change resolutions against companies ranging from coal mining to big box retailers. That’s a 40 percent increase over last year.
This is mostly due to the SEC’s recent guidance talk on climate change disclosure. As the SEC starts to keep a closer eye on these behemoth companies and their long-term impact on the environment, investors are clawing at an opportunity to voice themselves and have the SEC standing co-pilot.
Web 2.0 and the River of Sustainability Information: Is More Better?
By Ryan Whisnant
Last week I attended a panel hosted by the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan: “Green Tech: How the Web and Information Technology are Empowering Sustainability.” The panel featured Nick Aster, founder of TriplePundit.com, Nigel Melville, assistant professor of Business Information Technology at the Ross School of Business (who hosts a blog on IT and sustainability), and Karl Rosaen, a former member of the Google Android team who is currently working on realtimefarms.com , which aims to empower local farmers and raise awareness of the availability of fresh local produce.
The core question that emerged from the panel was whether new information technologies empower sustainability and, if so, how. Web 2.0 and social media technologies including blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and online video are clearly increasing the volume and sharing of information, but does this translate to more sustainable practices, either by companies or by individuals? One dynamic that has clearly shifted is the quest for authenticity. While business transactions in the not so distant past required establishing real human relationships, only recently have “layers of firewalls and PR departments” created a buffer for this direct human transaction with business. Ironically, it’s technology that is bringing back a sense of authenticity. Whether information sharing and human transaction are really the same thing is questionable, but there’s no denying that web 2.0 has created a system of checks and balances that helps hold companies more accountable in a public forum – companies just can’t fake it any more.
Greening with Microloans: How Small Loans Help Truckers Comply With New EPA Regulations
By Eric Weaver, CEO, Opportunity Fund
Last month, Opportunity Fund helped truckers beat a February deadline to retrofit their truck engines as new EPA emissions standards in California went into effect. Truckers told Opportunity Fund that without loans to cover the retrofitting costs, they would have had to give up trucking or move their business to another state. We’ve made 30 loans to truckers so far. The price tag to clean up their engines amounts to $12,000 – $19,000, well beyond the capacity many of the truckers have to pay with their $30,000-$40,000 annual incomes. In order to help, Opportunity Fund put $1 million in financing on the table to enable truckers to comply with the new regulations by retrofitting their trucks’ engines.
How International Business Outsourcing Helps Rural Development in India
By: Rishabh Kaul
A decade ago, the business world started outsourcing its back end work to the Indian megacities. But for a nation with 70% of its population living in rural settings, a new breed of Business Process Outsourcing companies (BPOs) are emerging which hope to tap into this talent pool. They are taking employment cost differentials to a whole new level. With much lower land rates, compared to their urban counterparts, rural BPOs are able to sustain themselves for as low as $1.50 to $2.00 USD, per hour.
Manoj Vasudevan left a high paying IBM job to start-up a rural BPO called SourcePilani in the university village of Pilani two years ago. Today, Source Pilani offers services such as medical transcription, social media marketing and SEO. Vasudevan feels that for a melting pot such as India (29 languages are spoken by more than a million native speakers), the true potential of rural BPOs can be achieved through voice-based services and not just low end jobs such as data entry.
My Missed Obama-tunity
Clothes hung outside the original Fellwood development April 15, 1949
By: Martin Melaver
I’m a sucker for dreams-go-sideways stories. You know the type: You work hard against all odds, you pull off amazing feats as an underdog, you’re on the brink of phenomenal success, and then something pulls the rug out from under you at the last minute. Still, despite the lack of external glory, there’s that intense internal satisfaction of having mastered a discipline and having realized one’s purpose in life. Or am I kidding myself?
Carbon Emissions Meets Financial Reporting: No Time to Waste
Image Source: Responsible Investor
By Lawrence E. Goldenhersh, president and CEO, Enviance, Inc.
In January of this year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) implemented unprecedented new reporting that mandate thousands of companies—many for the first time—track and report their carbon emissions for 2010. Companies have quickly realized that auditable GHG data tracking and management will quickly move from a “nice-to-have” to a mandatory component of financial reporting. (Editor’s Note: for more info on the SEC reporting, please see our Gina-Marie Cheeseman’s coverage from January).
Because of the financial implications of carbon going on the balance sheet, organizations must be able to verify CO2 emissions, not just loosely estimate them with “spreadsheet” data collection. The snowball effect of GHG emissions included in financial reporting is a heightened risk for inaccurate data, but also a call-to-action for companies to reduce carbon emissions to meet EPA and SEC regulations.
Olympics Create a Green Business Tipping Point in Canada
By: Dave Sherman, Blu Skye
On the eve of the Winter Olympics, over 300 CEOs and senior executives of Canadian businesses met in Vancouver to accelerate the implementation of sustainable business practices. The highly interactive day not only gave the executives an opportunity to explore new opportunities for collaboration, but may yet prove to have been a green business tipping point in Canada.
David Cheesewright, Walmart Canada’s CEO and the host of the event, kicked off the day by challenging the delegates to use the summit as a vehicle to “build a bigger team” – to share lessons learned and best practices that will benefit all businesses, large and small. He encouraged the delegates to create stretch goals and foster experimentation in their organizations, with the understanding that the road to sustainability is full of unknowns.
David Suzuki put the present moment in context for the Summit participants: our grandparent’s and parent’s generations did not understand that they were destroying the very systems that support our lives but, us–we are the first generation that does understand.
The Cleantech Open – A Bridge over the Valley of Death?
Ed Note: This is the second in a handful of guest posts we felt worth publishing on behalf of Chevron. Although we have mixed feelings about many aspects of the oil industry, Chevron’s sponsorship of today’s cleantech open speaks to their willingness to enter into a productive dialog with entrepreneurs building a new energy economy.
By Jim Davis, President, Chevron Energy Solution
The “Valley of Death” is a well known concept in the business startup and technology community. It’s the place where good ideas go to die. If small businesses are the lifeblood of economic growth and job creation, entrepreneurs and startup companies are the marrow. While the entrepreneurial path has never been easy, it has become even tougher in today’s economic climate.
Let me give you an example of the challenges for clean technology entrepreneurs that I see every day. In a business such as ours, which is “technology agnostic” in the sense that we aren’t tied to any one manufacturer or product, innovation and access to new technology are critical success factors.
Why Dismantling California’s AB32 Is Bad for Small Business
By: Cynthia Verdugo-Peralta
When it comes to achieving sustained economic recovery in California, it seems that some individuals, who presently have the bully pulpit, are asking all the wrong questions—and not surprisingly, coming up with all the wrong answers. They wonder–“What can we do to ‘protect’ California’s economy from AB32 (the state’s landmark energy security and climate law)?” Their answer (ironically called the “California Jobs Initiative“): Dismantle AB32 through a ballot initiative that could end up costing California jobs, long-term economic stability, as well as improved air quality, which could result in the reduction of negative health effects from air pollution.
A better question we should be asking is: How do we sustain California’s long-term economic growth, job creation, energy security and prosperity? The answer is not to throw away AB32 and all the potentially positive effects it will bring, both economically and environmentally.
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