Climate and Carbon

Crises Make Strange Bedfellows

Tuesday, August 05, 2008 / KW

Because I worked with Jimmy Carter on three of his books (a decade or more ago), I am on the Carter Center's mailing list for periodic reports about the ex-president's overseas travels. They tend to be a little more interesting than my family slide shows from Disney World, since they deal with things like peace negotiations, monitoring elections, and trying to wipe out infectious diseases in Africa. I guess everyone has a different idea of fun.

The latest report I received is from a trip to the Arctic that Jimmy and Rosalynn took in July aboard the Endeavor, a National Geographic ship operated by Lindblad Explorations. The passenger list was rather unusual. Carter writes:

Participants included Madeleine Albright, Tom Daschle, Chevy Chase, Larry Brilliant and Larry Page from Google, CEO of National Geographic John Fahey, Director of the Centers for Disease Control Julie Gerberding, CEO of Monsanto Hugh Grant, CEO of DuPont Chad Holliday, CEO of Aspen Institute Walter Isaacson, Governor of Colorado Bill Ritter, eBay CEO Meg Whitman, and President of Lindblad Explorations Sven Lindblad.

If you're like me, you don't know most of these people personally, but the list certainly includes some folks I think of as "good guys" and some as "not so good." (I recently saw an advance copy of a film about the industrialization of agriculture that depicts the behavior of Monsanto in the most dire terms imaginable — more on this as the movie gets closer to its release.) Of course, President Carter brought Yasir Arafat and Menachem Begin to the same conference table, so I guess he is used to being in the same room with people whose goals and motives are (to the say the least) divergent.

The entire trip focused on environmental issues. Carter spoke "regarding my experience as president dealing with an inherited energy crisis (reduced oil imports from 8.6 million barrels/day to 4.3 million/day — it's now 15!)." That much-maligned malaise speech about the need to address environmental challenges isn't looking so silly now, is it? A couple of other notable points from his report, with my comments:

The leaders of Google, Monsanto, DuPont, Aspen, CDC, Alliance of Automobile manufacturers, eBay, German CEOs of huge wind-power companies, NGOs, etc. reported on current plans and progress.

(That must have been interesting. Obviously a cruise like this would be no place to launch a fierce debate or even to ask harsh questions, but it certainly seems as though the organizations represented have one or two differences of opinion and practice when it comes to sustainability.)

Biggest international interest now is how to extract more from Arctic region (fishing, minerals, transport, military) and not how minimize global damage. U.S. has refused to ratify the Law of the Sea treaty while Russia and other Arctic nations are making claims and taking action. (Am I crazy or does this sound like a very big problem that is not getting anything like the attention it deserves from the mainstream media?)

Overall, the U.S. (and therefore the world) can act only if the next president can inspire the public and work harmoniously with a bi-partisan Congress, business, labor, science, environmentalists, educators, news media, etc.

(While undoubtedly true, this strikes me as a fairly depressing statement, since it will take a lot more than "inspiration" to get this motley group of self-interested players to work together harmoniously.)

All in all, I'm afraid the environmental crises we are facing are going to have to get worse before we have much chance of making them better.

An Excellent Primer On The Advantages And Drawbacks of Carbon Offsets

Sunday, April 06, 2008 / KW

Recommended reading: From ClimateBiz, a fine article by Carolyn Sherwood Call on how carbon offsets actually work — exceptionally clear, thorough, and balanced. Call's bottom line:

If your company wants to put money toward reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, look first to make changes that reduce your own carbon footprint. Often, such investments are not only good for the planet; they'll also save you money over time. Replacing incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents, using hybrid vehicles for the company's fleet, and installing building control systems to reduce energy waste can reduce your carbon footprint and improve the bottom line.

If you want to do more, offset purchases are worth considering. Revenues generated by offset purchases provide critical funding for many projects that reduce greenhouse gases. If you do decide to buy offsets, take the time to research the various offset providers. Look for details on their websites. The more transparent they're willing to be, the more likely that their projects and their calculations can stand up to scrutiny.

Managers considering carbon offsets as part of their green business strategy might want to circulate Call's article among their top decision-makers — it would be a good tool for getting an informed conversation about the topic started.

The Power Of Information To Nudge Us Toward Sustainability

Thursday, March 27, 2008 / KW

The notion, discussed here recently, that automated, easy-to-understand metrics are one key to sustainable consumption seems to be gaining traction. One straw in the wind: this article in the New York Times, which references a new book, Nudge, by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago.

The book is about how well-chosen, readily accessible pieces of information can be more effective than either financial incentives or government regulation in encouraging smarter consumer behavior. A key passage from the Times article:

"Getting the prices right will not create the right behavior if people do not associate their behavior with the relevant costs," says Dr. Thaler, a professor of behavioral science and economics. "When I turn the thermostat down on my A-C, I only vaguely know how much that costs me. If the thermostat were programmed to tell you immediately how much you are spending, the effect would be much more powerful."

It would be still more powerful, he and Mr. Sunstein suggest, if you knew how your energy consumption compared with the social norm. A study in California showed that when the monthly electric bill listed the average consumption in the neighborhood, the people in above-average households significantly decreased their consumption.

Meanwhile, the people with the below-average bills reacted by significantly increasing their consumption — not exactly the goal of the project.

That reaction was avoided when the bill featured a little drawing along with the numbers: a smiling face on a below-average bill or a frowning face on an above-average bill. After that simple nudge, the heavy users made even bigger cuts in consumption, while the light users remained frugal.

Amazing, isn't it, how subtly powerful even simple-minded devices like smiley faces can be for nudging people in the right direction?

And please don't write in with indignant complaints about "the nanny state" manipulating us. Does anyone really think that smiley faces on our utility bills would outweigh the thousands of pro-consumption messages we absorb every day through television commercials, radio ads, billboards, print ads, and all the rest?

We already have plenty of nannies trying to manipulate us — and they are all sending the same message: "Buy, buy, buy!" A few nannies offering a gentle warning about the long-term dangers of over-consumption won't deprive us of our freedom.

Consumption — The Other Side Of Sustainability

Tuesday, February 26, 2008 / AS

In this post, I want to deviate from my usual discussion about sustainability, corporations, and profits.

I want to discuss something that rarely gets discussed in the sustainability world but which I think is going to be a subject of increasing attention. It's the fact that sustainability is really a two-sided coin. On the one side is sustainable production, which is what all of us in business like to talk about — how companies can get leaner and greener. But on the other side is sustainable consumption, which is something that we don’t talk about much.

I want to frame this issues by talking about globalization — not in economic terms, but in environmental and social terms.

One of the most interesting and important aspects of climate change is that it is a global issue with global impacts. If China continues to burn coal at the rate it needs to sustain its economic growth, Manhattan, Boston, and Miami will be threatened by rising seas, and farmers in Kansas and Nebraska will have to switch crops or move. When farmers in Brazil cut down rainforests, the temperature in Boise goes up.

There is no place to run from climate change. Polar bears living at the North and South Poles are threatened.

Globalization has also produced social impacts that are worldwide. We've thrown out most of our toys that were made in China, even after China executed the official who was in charge of product safety. (And we complain about tough government regulations here!) We import so many products from China that their product safety issues affect us directly. To some extent, the same is true for child and slave labor. China's social issues are also our issues, whether we like it or not.

And resource issues have also become global. We are due to run out of oil and a number of metals that we need to feed the manufacturing infrastructure that supplies us with everything from building materials to cutlery.

Water is the most dramatic example of the coming resources crunch. The list of areas that are likely to run out of water in the next thirty to fifty years is scary, and it is already happening right here at home. Las Vegas, the fastest-growing city in the U.S., is built in the middle of a desert, and the lake that supplies it with its water is drying up from the top and silting up from the bottom. Similar things are happening in many large areas of the world.

Andy Liveris, the CEO of Dow, has said that "water is the oil of the 21st century." The Pentagon has conducted scenario planning around the idea that the world will be engulfed in a series of regional wars fought over water in the next century.

But in this globalized world, consumption has not yet become globalized. It's well known that the United States, with only five percent of the world’s population, consumes twenty-five percent of the world's fossil fuel. We have only one fifth of the population of China, but we account for more global warming than they do (although the gap is rapidly shrinking).

Jared Diamond recently observed that the average American consumes 32 times as many resources as the average Kenyan. When you consider that a billion people live on less than $1 a day, that my lunch cost probably $20 and I am already thinking about dinner, you'd think the ratio would be even higher.

Now put this in a global context. It has been calculated that if the rest of the world were to start living at the same standard of living as people in the U.S., it would take twelve planet Earths to support our collective lifestyle. When I think about how much stuff I throw out every week, that doesn't really surprise me either. But as far as we know, we only have the natural resources of one planet Earth at our disposal.

The papers are filled with articles about how people in the West are obese, but you don't read very much about the fact that the economies of the West are also obese.

And you certainly are not likely to hear this from corporations that are in the business of selling more stuff. To the extent they are focused on sustainability, they are focused on being more efficient in manufacturing and selling us more stuff. But if you look at the numbers, the kinds of efficiencies they can make are not going to reduce our consumption to a sustainable level, not by a long shot. We can all buy hybrid cars and low-impact fluorescent bulbs, but that only slows the growth of pollution.

The fact is that we need to practice sustainability on both sides of the coin: sustainable production and sustainable consumption.

It's rare to hear companies say, "Consume less," and rarer still to hear them say, "Consume less of our products." A few years ago, McDonald's in France ran some ads saying, "If you have a weight problem, don't eat here so much." The corporate PR guys on Oakbrook Illinois found the people who were responsible and sent them to the (corporate) guillotine.

There are a handful of industries that are just beginning to address the issue of sustainable consumption.

Twenty-five years ago, when I was just getting involved in environmental matters, Massachusetts passed a law that would pay electric utilities for getting their customers to use less energy. Under the new scheme, the utilities would get paid the same, and in some cases more, if they sold less energy by convincing customers to use less, or to use it during off-peak times.

This became a national program called Demand Side Management (DSM). It has the potential to revolutionize the consumption of electricity all over the world. We need to apply this model to other areas of consumption.

Reducing our level of consumption is going to be tough for us in the developed world to swallow, and I frankly don’t know how it is going to happen. We have the strongest military in the world, now unconstrained by any opposing force. And we have proved very willing to fight to maintain our life style, with the war in Iraq (motivated at least in part by the desire to guarantee access to that country's oil reserves) seemingly just the latest example.

I think sustainable consumption will come about — if it does — through a combination of five factors:

Market forces. If you've traveled recently, you know that our standard of living is down because of the weak dollar. Imported goods are also more expensive. At the same time, the prices of gas and other natural resource will continue to climb. All of this will tend to bring our standard of living down, closer to that of the developing countries.
Regulation. China legislated only one child per family, and although I don't think we will ever go that far, I do envision more consumption taxes and possibly the rationing of various commodities. We are already going down that road with water use.
Technical innovation. Science may help alleviate the resources crunch. I'm thinking about things like genetically-modified organisms, clean hydrogen or nuclear fusion, and cost-effective water desalinization. But technology will not solve the problem. We're not quite as smart as we like to believe, and there is no technological genie waiting to grant our every wish.
International conflict. The next century will see a lot of battles over resources, and the West is destined to fight a number of wars like the war in Iraq — wars we realistically cannot win. These military defeats may be a necessary evil to wake us up to the need for sustainable consumption.
Redefinition of consumer preferences. This is the hardest one of all. It requires redefining quality of life by understanding that "Less is more." The simplicity movement needs to go from a cult to a mass movement.

I think you can see now why this topic doesn't get discussed much in business circles.

I had the pleasure of being a keynote speaker with Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia at a "net impact" event late last year. He has done as much as any CEO to make sure that his company is respectful and protective of the environment. Yet in front of 100 net impacters, he said (I am paraphrasing), "I have talked to some serious scientists, and most of them believe we have passed the point of no return. We have no hope left to save the Earth."

We all want to think we can go on living this way forever, and that our children should have more than we did. But deep down we recognize that this can't be the case except for a smaller and smaller percentage of us. Not only are there billions of people who want to escape from grinding poverty — and obviously deserve a chance to do so — but in addition the world's population is still growing. By 2050, it is projected to increase from the current six billion to nine billion, and three-quarters of this growth will be in the developing world. So we are going to have a lot more mouths to feed, hands to wash, and people without homes or hope.

I apologize if this message seems like a downer. Maybe I need to find my Prozac. But the issue of sustainable consumption isn't going to vanish just because we prefer to ignore it. I think we're grown-up enough to start talking about it. What do you think?

Venice and Dhaka: Cities on the Brink, Half a Planet Apart

Sunday, October 28, 2007 / KW

As fate would have it, during 2007, my wife Mary-Jo and I visited two of the world's more unusual cities: Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, and Venice, Italy.

In some ways, the cities are as different as can be. Dhaka is terribly poor, a city of 13 million that has experienced out-of-control growth in recent decades as impoverished farmers flee the South Asian countryside in search of work, filling hastily-built tenement apartments and straining the city's already overtaxed infrastructure past the breaking point. (There are obvious analogies to Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Jakarta, and many other cities in the developing world.)

By contrast, Venice is a little jewel of a city, a tourist mecca steeped in history and filled with museums, churches, palaces, and other mementos from an era when the city was one of the richest and most powerful in Europe. Visitors flock to Venice's luxury hotels, its world-class restaurants, its famous arts festivals (such as the Biennale, which Mary-Jo and I attended), and its narrow cobblestone streets lined with designer shops — Fendi, Gucci, Armani, etc. etc.

Yet Dhaka and Venice have one big thing in common: Both are low-lying coastal cities that have long suffered from periodic flooding and are now threatened with massive destruction due to rising sea levels associated with climate change. As such, they represent the bleeding edge of a problem that will ultimately impact billions of people. With over 60 percent of the world's population living within 100 km of its seacoasts, the problems faced by these two cities will eventually threaten most of us.

And it is sobering to see how difficult those problems are to solve — not only for the people of Dhaka, who live in one of the poorest and least-cared-for nations of the world, but even for the relatively wealthy citizens of Venice, recognized the world over as one of civilization's great cultural treasures.

You've probably heard about the so-called MOSE (Moses) system, an enormous series of mobile floodgates designed to protect Venice from the effects of higher-than-normal tides by sealing off the city's famous lagoon from the rising waters of the Adriatic Sea. (The system has been described and explained in a number of television documentaries that have been seen the world over.) One of history's most massive engineering projects, including 78 movable steel gates, each 65 feet wide, 60 to 90 feet long, and 15 feet thick, MOSE is actually under construction and is scheduled for completion in 2011.

Yet already, just four years after the launch of the costly, controversial project, many environmentalists — including the mayor of Venice, Massimo Cacciari — are saying that the plan may already have been rendered obsolete by the accelerating pace of global climate change:

Sea levels are set to rise too high because of global warming, Cacciari said, making the system under construction "useless".

"On the basis of the precautionary principle we have to assume the most pessimistic figure, 50-60 cm above the average sea level in the next few decades," Cacciari said.

Therefore, he said, Moses was irrelevant because "you're still going to be too low".

If predicted levels of ocean rise take place, the MOSE system may prove to be merely a temporary stopgap rather than a lasting solution to Venice's environmental problems. And by altering the age-old relationship between Venice and sea, it may well produce new problems:

This stall tactic could come at a high price, explains biologist Richard Gersberg of San Diego State University. Closing the barriers could complicate the city's precarious sewage situation and cause health problems. Venice lacks modern sewage, relying instead on tides to flush wastes from the canals into the Adriatic Sea.

"There's a concern that, when the barriers come up, then that flushing will be cut off," says Gersberg. "MOSE gates, from what I've read, are supposed to be closed for only a short time. But is sea level going to cooperate with that theory? My best guess is, no."

You see the danger: If global warming drives water levels in the Adriatic much higher, the flood tides that MOSE is designed to stop may occur year-round rather than once every year or two. And if, in response, the water gates end up being shut permanently rather than just for brief periods, the disappearance of the traditional tidal pressures that formerly cleaned out the lagoon could turn the waters surrounding Venice's 118 small islands into a stew of toxic wastes. A gigantic new sewage treatment system would be required — and that, of course, would still not address the fact that the rising sea waters are likely to overpower the protection provided by MOSE.

Local officials are frantically studying ideas that might complement MOSE. One Italian company claims it could use hydaulic pumps to raise the level of buildings in the city by at least a meter. Would it work? Who knows? At this point we are obviously in the realm of untried technologies that may need to be deployed in hopes of saving an absolutely unique human resource. There's only one Venice, and once it is gone it is gone forever.

Of course, much the same can be said about a lot of other things that are threatened by current environmental crises, from endangered animal species like the tiger and the polar bear to the Great Barrier Reef to the city of Dhaka and the tens of millions of Bangladeshis whose homes and farms could be inundated permanently as a result of global warming.

As for Dhaka, its plight has not generated the same level of worldwide interest as that of Venice. So far, programs to alleviate the environmental threat to Bangladesh are limited to things like planting coastlines with mangrove trees in an effort to limit erosion. It's safe to say that $4.5 billion tidal floodgate systems are not in the cards . . . even though the human toll from an inundation of Dhaka would be far worse than if the same catastrophe were to strike Venice.

What does it all mean for the business managers who are the primary readers of this blog? Not much, directly. There's relatively little that an individual corporation can do to protect either Venice or Dhaka from the effects of global warming. The growing dangers to the world's coastlines clearly constitute a problem that is too big for private enterprise alone to solve. Even individual national governments lack the resources to address this challenge. Only international cooperation backed by a serious financial commitment has chance of reversing the dangerous trends.

But the story certainly underscores the growing urgency of the environmental initiatives that more and more businesses are undertaking, especially in the area of reducing carbon emissions. And while there's a dangerous disconnect between the responsibility we all share for the problem and the immediate impact of the suffering, perhaps thinking about the costs our world may have to pay can help us remain focused.

After all, do we really want our grandchildren to know that we could have done something to save what they will know as the Lost City of Venice — but chose not to?