Turning Carbon Disclosure Into A Virtue

By LESLIE KAUFMAN

Published: December 28, 2009 in the By Degrees series in the New York Times

Cupping their hands near holes drilled for cable routing, workers at the Boeing Company’s four-acre data processing site near Seattle noticed this year that air used to keep the computers cool was seeping through floor openings.

Mindful of the company’s drive to slash electricity consumption by 25 percent, they tucked insulation into holes there and at five similar sites. The resulting savings are projected at $55,000, or some 685,000 kilowatt hours of electricity a year.

Yet Boeing’s goal is not just to save money. The hope is to keep pace with other companies that have joined in a vast global experiment in tracking the carbon dioxide emissions generated by industry.

Boeing and other enterprises are voluntarily doing what some might fiercely resist being forced to do: submitting detailed reports on how much they emit, largely through fossil fuel consumption, to a central clearinghouse.

The information flows to the Carbon Disclosure Project, a small nonprofit organization based in London that sifts through the numbers and generates snapshots by industry sectors in different nations.

By giving enterprises a road map for measuring their emissions and pointing out how they compare with their peers, experts say, the voluntary project is persuading companies to change their energy practices well before many governments step in to regulate emissions.

Scientists estimate that industry and energy providers produce nearly 45 percent of the heat-trapping emissions that contribute to global warming. While some governments are convinced that reining in such pollution is crucial to protecting the atmosphere, a binding global pact is not on the immediate horizon, as negotiations in Copenhagen showed this month.

Until broad regulation is at hand, many investors and company executives say, voluntary reporting programs like the Carbon Disclosure Project may be the best way to leverage market forces for change.

They say the project sends a message that a company that moves to curb emissions now is girded for the future and therefore worthy of investment.

“With the regulatory framework changing, how companies handle carbon is a core risk factor,” said Jack Ehnes, chief executive of Calstrs, the California teachers’ pension fund. “Smart companies will take C.D.P. information and realign their strategies.”

Mary Armstrong, Boeing’s vice president for environment, health and safety, traces her company’s energy focus back to 2007, when she first saw the forms that companies fill out for the disclosure project.

“The questions take you through and say, ‘Do you have environmental performance targets?’ We didn’t, but now we do,” she said. The companies’ individual responses are posted at the project’s Web site.

In contrast to the United States, European Union countries already regulate carbon dioxide emissions from their most energy-intensive industries through a cap and trade program, and Japan polices energy consumption itself.

Paul Dickinson, the founder and chief executive of the Carbon Disclosure Project, is quick to acknowledge that his group is no substitute for muscular government regulation. But he argues that the voluntary project offers a frictionless path toward reining in emissions, even in relatively unregulated markets like China’s and India’s. Emissions are expected to soar in those fast-growing economies in coming years as new coal-fired plants go online.

Yet even as the Carbon Disclosure Project has established itself as the standard for emissions measurement methods, it has stirred some skepticism. Critics say that the emissions figures do not have to be verified through external audits, as financial figures from publicly traded companies must be.

And some argue that the project rewards companies that would have cut their carbon dioxide output anyway, and has no influence over polluting companies that refuse to take part.

Nonetheless, 2,500 of the world’s largest companies completed at least part of the project’s questionnaire last year, from the energy conglomerate Gazprom in Russia to Huaxin Cement in China.

In the United States, where almost only the companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index were solicited by the disclosure project, some 330 filled out forms this year. Some companies do not answer all of the questions. But the most detailed reports specify not only how much energy a company consumes, and how, but also ticks off ways in which it might be vulnerable to climate change — flooded stores, for example.

Industry is a broad and varied category, of course, covering everything from cement and chemical makers, which emit an enormous amount of carbon dioxide, to data-driven businesses like financial services, which emit little by comparison.

The disclosure project has response rates of at least 60 percent for most industry sectors in the United States. But it has even higher rates for utilities, which are highly regulated, and materials companies, which include cement and chemical makers. It has received responses from energy titans like Chevron and chemical companies like DuPont.

To drum up more and better reporting, the project has enlisted major investors like Calstrs, the nation’s second-largest pension program, and Bank of America Merrill Lynch to co-sign letters from the project encouraging companies to take part.

Mr. Dickinson said the project writes letters on behalf of 475 investor groups representing $55 trillion in funds worldwide.

Some American companies have argued that reporting is cumbersome and could allow competitors to learn too much about their manufacturing processes. But proponents counter that the monitoring could give some of them a competitive advantage as early adopters.

In September, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it could require the nation’s biggest power plants and industrial operations to report greenhouse gas emissions as early as 2011. The United States Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers have firmly opposed such regulation, saying that it would be legally and technically burdensome, drive up fuel costs by promoting renewable sources and send job overseas.

But nations that have already pressed ahead with regulations are prodding the United States to match their efforts. The European Union has been monitoring and limiting carbon dioxide emissions from its most energy-intensive sectors since 2005 through a cap and trade program.

Since 2003 Japan has required companies of any size to report energy consumption to the government and what they are doing to reduce use. Mr. Dickinson argues that disclosure could prove a means of currying investor favor in international markets as the global awareness of industry’s role in climate change deepens.

“I have real confidence that the corporations of the world are going to outperform government in terms of dealing with climate change,” he said. “In fact, they are already.”

His vision for carbon transparency dates back to 1997, when he entered a master’s program on responsible business practices at the University of Bath School of Management taught by Anita Roddick, the founder of The Body Shop.

After graduating, he solicited philanthropists, including Ted Turner, and went about developing reliable ways to measure output. Then he reached out to large investors to co-sign letters demanding that companies fill out the project’s forms. Until 2002, the forms spoke only of “the perception” of climate change because global warming was still “too controversial,” he said.

Some analysts now laud the program as an innovative way of encouraging investors to factor industry emissions into assessments of corporate performance.

Abyd Karmali, global head of carbon markets for Bank of America, likens the disclosure project to the advent of general accounting principles, which enable investors to compare financial performance and move dollars accordingly.

“It is very difficult to translate carbon-related risk into standardized disclosure, so it is a fantastic contribution,” he said.

But others have their doubts. “There is disclosure, and then so what?” said Hewson Baltzell, the co-founder of Innovest, a financial research firm that gathered figures for the disclosure project the first several years. “They’ve dipped their toe in the water on asking companies about performance, but not very far.”

Mr. Dickinson counters that the project has added evaluations that rate companies by concrete steps taken to cut their emissions. It now also asks companies to calculate emissions of their suppliers, in the hope of leveraging the power that a giant like Wal-Mart might have over those that are otherwise unwilling to report.

Rob Bernard, chief environmental strategist for Microsoft, which is helping the project make its data more accessible to the public, says the impact of the reports is growing.

“With each year we are able to compare performance on greenhouse gas information with new levels of granularity,” he said. “Now we just have to hope that more people read it and care.”

To Save The Planet, Save The Seas

By DAN LAFFOLEY

Published: December 26, 2009 in the New York Times

Peterborough, England

FOR the many disappointments of the recent climate talks in Copenhagen, there was at least one clear positive outcome, and that was the progress made on a program called Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Forest Degradation. Under this program, key elements of which were agreed on at Copenhagen, developing countries would be compensated for preserving forests, peat soils, swamps and fields that are efficient absorbers of carbon dioxide, the primary heat-trapping gas linked to global warming.

This approach, which takes advantage of the power of nature itself, is an economical way to store large amounts of carbon. But the program is limited in that it includes only those carbon sinks found on land. We now need to look for similar opportunities to curb climate change in the oceans.

Few people may realize it, but in addition to producing most of the oxygen we breathe, the ocean absorbs some 25 percent of current annual carbon dioxide emissions. Half the world’s carbon stocks are held in plankton, mangroves, salt marshes and other marine life. So it is at least as important to preserve this ocean life as it is to preserve forests, to secure its role in helping us adapt to and mitigate climate change.

Sea-grass meadows, for example, which flourish in shallow coastal waters, account for 15 percent of the ocean’s total carbon storage, and underwater forests of kelp store huge amounts of carbon, just as forests do on land. The most efficient natural carbon sink of all is not on land, but in the ocean, in the form of Posidonia oceanica, a species of sea grass that forms vast underwater meadows that wave in the currents just as fields of grass on land sway in the wind.

Worldwide, coastal habitats like these are being lost because of human activity. Extensive areas have been altered by land reclamation and fish farming, while coastal pollution and overfishing have further damaged habitats and reduced the variety of species. It is now clear that such degradation has not only affected the livelihoods and well-being of more than two billion people dependent on coastal ecosystems for food, it has also reduced the capacity of these ecosystems to store carbon.

The case for better management of oceans and coasts is twofold. These healthy plant habitats help meet the needs of people adapting to climate change, and they also reduce greenhouse gases by storing carbon dioxide. Countries should be encouraged to establish marine protected areas — that is, set aside parts of the coast and sea where nature is allowed to thrive without undue human interference — and do what they can to restore habitats like salt marshes, kelp forests and sea-grass meadows.

Managing these habitats is far less expensive than trying to shore up coastlines after the damage has been done. Maintaining healthy stands of mangroves in Asia through careful management, for example, has proved to cost only one-seventh of what it would cost to erect manmade coastal defenses against storms, waves and tidal surges.

The discussions in Copenhagen have opened the way for all countries to improve the management of oceans and coasts to harness their immense potential to mitigate climate change — especially over the next decade, while the world’s politicians, scientists and engineers develop longer-term strategies for stabilizing the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases.

In their continuing negotiations on climate change, nations should now make it a priority to produce a single map of the world that documents all the different types of coastal carbon sinks, and identify the ones that are in most immediate need of preservation. New studies should be undertaken to better understand how best to manage these areas to increase carbon sequestration. Then, following the example of the forests program, it will be possible to establish formulas for compensating countries that preserve essential carbon sinks in the oceans.

We urgently need to bring the ocean into the agenda alongside forests so that, as soon as possible, we can help the oceans to help us.

Dan Laffoley is the marine vice chairman of the World Commission on Protected Areas at the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the principal specialist for marine at Natural England.

Need Help With A New Year's Resolution

From our friend Ali Krishna in Gainesville...

I admit it. I'm obsessed. I'm a fanatic. I can't stop thinking about it. So I'm going to do something about it.

This year, I will beg, I will plead, implore, request, abjure, advocate, beseech, besiege, bribe, canvass, conjure, entreat, impetrate, importune, invoke, nag, obsecrate, obtest, petition, pray, press, requisition, solicit, supplicate, urge, woo, and ask all of you to PLEASE STOP EATING MEAT! (in between studying for my GRE's).

This year, the UN Conference on Climate Change was held in Copenhagen from December 7th-18th. Delegates from 192 countries negotiated global and shared solutions against global warming. Yet, show me in the itinerary where the livestock industry sat center stage, guilty as charge?

How long will our university's textbooks continue to ignore the impact of livestock production on climate change, human and environmental injustice?

Here in the US, articles in popular eco-magazines like Sierra publish articles articulating the importance of improving biofuels, limiting CO2, ending mountain top removal, controling mercury levels, boosting MPGs, and regulating coal ash. It seems to me like something is missing. Something very obvious, yet too inconvenient, even for Al Gore.

It's about the meat industry, stupid. But as Paul Goodman puts it, "No good has ever come from feeling guilty, neither intelligence, policy, nor compassion. The guilty do not pay attention to the object but only to themselves, and not even to their own interests, which might make sense, but to their anxieties.''

Maybe I've gone ecocentric in my old age but I'm actually striving to be GAURA-centric. Over 1 billion people are currently suffering from starvation or malnutrition. If this world isn't about suffering, I wouldn't be here. I'm not claiming to be a saint but as Reno Sweeny puts it in the musical Anything Goes, "But now that I have seen the light, I eat grains by day and fruits by night."

Here are three recent articles, again demonstrating the symbiotic relationship of eating meat and climate change:

"Global Warming: the impact of meat production & consumption on climate change"

"India Tells West to Stop Eating Beef"

"People should give up eating meat to halt climate change"

Green Acres Is The Place To Be!

Click here to read the full article from the Wall Street Journal

History shows economic downturns or disasters such as the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks frequently trigger a short-lived appetite for escape, and that those approaching retirement often crave more-remote properties. If baby boomers follow typical migration patterns, the rural population age 55-85 will increase by 30% between 2010 and 2020, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service.

But other factors, such as widespread Internet access, are giving this current ruralpolitan trend new longevity, particularly among younger generations. Enhanced renewable-energy options and associated tax credits mean homes can be more affordably powered by the sun or wind in areas where utility companies won't service cheaply.

Younger buyers, such as Jesse Ptacek, 27, have time to reap payback from such investments. For the past few years, Mr. Ptacek has watched the U.S. economy flounder from Kuwait, where he's a firefighter for a U.S. Department of Defense contractor. Knowing he will likely face bleak job prospects upon his return home in January, he recently bought 62 acres of land in Montana.

His new spread, for which he paid $225,000, includes a 2,100-square-foot, three-bedroom log home situated well off the grid. Its main heat source is a wood stove, there's bear, moose and pheasant hunting nearby, and Mr. Ptacek is erecting solar panels for electricity. He expects to commute up to 60 miles for work, likely in Great Falls or Helena. "I've done the stock-market thing, and I lost money like everyone else," says the unmarried Mr. Ptacek, whose grew up in Rochester, Minn., population 100,845. "And I started to think about things, what's real, what's not real.

Off To The Races

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: December 19, 2009 in the New York Times

I’ve long believed there are two basic strategies for dealing with climate change — the “Earth Day” strategy and the “Earth Race” strategy. This Copenhagen climate summit was based on the Earth Day strategy. It was not very impressive. This conference produced a series of limited, conditional, messy compromises, which it is not at all clear will get us any closer to mitigating climate change at the speed and scale we need.

Indeed, anyone who watched the chaotic way this conference was “organized,” and the bickering by delegates with which it finished, has to ask whether this 17-year U.N. process to build a global framework to roll back global warming is broken: too many countries — 193 — and too many moving parts. I leave here feeling more strongly than ever that America needs to focus on its own Earth Race strategy instead. Let me explain.

The Earth Day strategy said that the biggest threat to mankind is climate change, and we as a global community have to hold hands and attack this problem with a collective global mechanism for codifying and verifying everyone’s carbon-dioxide emissions and reductions and to transfer billions of dollars in clean technologies to developing countries to help them take part.

But as President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil told this conference, this Earth Day framework only works “if countries take responsibility to meet their targets” and if the rich nations really help the poor ones buy clean power sources.

That was never going to happen at scale in the present global economic climate. The only way it might happen is if we had “a perfect storm” — a storm big enough to finally end the global warming debate but not so big that it ended the world.

Absent such a storm that literally parts the Red Sea again and drives home to all the doubters that catastrophic climate change is a clear and present danger, the domestic pressures in every country to avoid legally binding and verifiable carbon reductions will remain very powerful.

Does that mean this whole Earth Day strategy is a waste? No. The scientific understanding about the climate that this U.N. process has generated and the general spur to action it provides is valuable. And the mechanism this conference put in place to enable developed countries and companies to offset their emissions by funding protection of tropical rain forests, if it works, would be hugely valuable.

Still, I am an Earth Race guy. I believe that averting catastrophic climate change is a huge scale issue. The only engine big enough to impact Mother Nature is Father Greed: the Market. Only a market, shaped by regulations and incentives to stimulate massive innovation in clean, emission-free power sources can make a dent in global warming. And no market can do that better than America’s.

Therefore, the goal of Earth Racers is to focus on getting the U.S. Senate to pass an energy bill, with a long-term price on carbon that will really stimulate America to become the world leader in clean-tech. If we lead by example, more people will follow us by emulation than by compulsion of some U.N. treaty.

In the cold war, we had the space race: who could be the first to put a man on the moon. Only two countries competed, and there could be only one winner. Today, we need the Earth Race: who can be the first to invent the most clean technologies so men and women can live safely here on Earth.

Maybe the best thing President Obama could have done here in Copenhagen was to make clear that America intends to win that race. All he needed to do in his speech was to look China’s prime minister in the eye and say: “I am going to get our Senate to pass an energy bill with a price on carbon so we can clean your clock in clean-tech. This is my moon shot. Game on.”

Because once we get America racing China, China racing Europe, Europe racing Japan, Japan racing Brazil, we can quickly move down the innovation-manufacturing curve and shrink the cost of electric cars, batteries, solar and wind so these are no longer luxury products for the wealthy nations but commodity items the third world can use and even produce.

If you start the conversation with “climate” you might get half of America to sign up for action. If you start the conversation with giving birth to a “whole new industry” — one that will make us more energy independent, prosperous, secure, innovative, respected and able to out-green China in the next great global industry — you get the country.

For good reason: Even if the world never warms another degree, population is projected to rise from 6.7 billion to 9 billion between now and 2050, and more and more of those people will want to live like Americans. In this world, demand for clean power and energy efficient cars and buildings will go through the roof.

An Earth Race led by America — built on markets, economic competition, national self-interest and strategic advantage — is a much more self-sustaining way to reduce carbon emissions than a festival of voluntary, nonbinding commitments at a U.N. conference. Let the Earth Race begin.

Clear-Cutting The Truth About Trees

Click here to read the full article from the New York Times

A few environmental groups in Copenhagen were considered unwelcome guests for loudly pointing out that the carbon-trading proposals bandied about at the meetings subsidize forest destruction and will lead to large-scale destruction of ecosystems and unprecedented “land grabs.” (Disclosure: my wife is a researcher for one of those groups.) But such claims are correct. More than anything, carbon offsets will allow rich countries to burn ever more fossil fuels under the “clean development mechanism” of the Kyoto Protocol, the system that sets the values, in terms of tons of carbon equivalent, of emission-reduction efforts.

In fact, most of the problems with the system can be traced back to the Kyoto Protocol, which was adopted in 1997. After much political wrangling, the Kyoto delegates decided that there would be no carbon-reduction credits for saving existing forests. Since planting new trees does get one credits, Kyoto actually created a rationale for clear-cutting old growth.

This is horrifying. The world’s forests are a key to our survival, and that of millions of other species. Not only are they critical to providing us with building material, paper, food, recreation and oxygen, they also ground us spiritually and connect us to our primal past. Never before in earth’s history have our forests been under such attack. And the global-warming folks at Copenhagen seem oblivious, buying into the corporate view of forests as an exploitable resource.

A forest is an ecosystem. It is not something planted. A forest grows on its own. There are many kinds of forests that will grow practically anywhere, each under its own special local conditions. When a tree falls, the race is on immediately to replace it. In the forests I study, there so many seeds and seedlings that if a square foot of ground space opens up, more than a hundred trees of many different species compete to grow there.

Food For Life Global Helping In Haiti

By Madhava Smullen on 23 Jan 2010

From ISKCON News

Image: CBC News

Tens of thousands of homes have been destroyed and people’s livelihoods devastated.

Hare Krishna Food For Life Global is joining forces with several ISKCON temples to provide nutritious, hot vegetarian meals to victims of January 12th’s massive earthquake in Haiti.

The quake, which measured 7.0 point on the Richter scale, struck at 5pm local time and is estimated to have killed between 100,000 and 200,000 people, most of whom were buried alive under collapsing buildings. Homes have been destroyed and livelihoods devastated in a disaster that the International Red Cross estimates has affected about three million people.

Food for Life is planning to complement the efforts of bigger agencies such as the Red Cross, CARE and OXFAM, and will be working under the protection of the military from internationally secured sites. Water for Life Global will supply a sanitation service and mobile water purifying system for the project.

ISKCON is providing volunteer support from the USA, Brazil, Hungary, and the UK as well as locally.

Chaitanya Dasa, a Food For Life volunteer especially experienced in disaster relief, is leading the Hungarian team. Back in 2005, Chaitanya received an award from the Hungarian Government for his outstanding services to victims of Sri Lanka’s December 2004 Tsunami.

The relief efforts will initially be funded by ISKCON Hungary, as well as Bhaktivedanta Manor’s welfare arm The Lotus Trust in the UK.

The volunteers—who currently number a dozen, and will soon be joined by congregational devotees—are coordinating food supplies and equipment from the Santo Domingo temple in the Dominican Republic, which they will transport to Haiti once local people have received vital medical help and the roads have been cleared.

They then plan to feed thousands a day with hot prasadam meals, as well as to distribute canned and packaged goods. The initial group of volunteers aim to stay in Haiti for at least one month, after which they may be replaced by others if necessary.

“It will take some time before things stabilize in the country,” said Food for Life Director Priyavrata Dasa, “So this effort is likely to end up as a four-month endeavor.”

To donate to Food For Life’s Haiti relief efforts, please visit http://www.thelotustrust.org/earthquake or www.ffl.org.

Haiti Facts

Estimates of those killed by the massive earthquake measuring 7.0 point on the Richter scale that struck the nation of Haiti at 5pm local time on Tuesday, January 12th range from 100,000 to 200,000, most buried alive due to collapsing buildings. Tens of thousands of homes have been destroyed and people’s livelihoods devastated.

ISKCON devotees who have a temple within travelling distance of the affected area are preparing to provide vegetarian food as part of its Food For Life programme. The temple Domingo is on board with relief efforts and has cooking facilities with numerous volunteers ready to help. Food for Life Global is partnering with Water for Life Global who have mobile water purifying system and they will also be providing a sanitation service.

Hare Krishna Food for Life Global is planning to work under the protection of the military complementing the work of bigger agencies such as CARE and OXFAM and Red Cross at present.

ISKCON is providing volunteer support from USA, Brazil, Hungary, the UK as well as locally.

Food for Life Director Priyavrata Dasa said, “It will take some time before things stabilize in the country, and is likely to end up as a four month endeavor.”

The Lotus Trust, the welfare arm of Bhaktivedanta Manor in the UK, is working with partner food relief organisations currently with a base in nearby Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic where food supplies are being prepared to go into Haiti once the roads are cleared to ensure local people receive vital help.

The Hungarian group is led by Chaitanya Dasa, a Food For Life volunteer who specializes in disaster relief. In 2005, he was given an award by the Hungarian Government for his outstanding services provided to the December 2004 Tsunami victims of Sri Lanka.

The group joined forces with the Santo Domingo temple first on January 21. They will then travel from there to Haiti, where, with the help of the Dominican devotees, they are planning to feed thousands a day with nutritious hot vegetarian meals. They will also distribute canned or packaged goods. The initial funding is being provided by the Hungarian Yatra. This group of devotees are planning to stay in Haiti for a month, and if it necessary they will be replaced by others after one month.

The devotees will start coordinating everything from the Santo Domingo temple, then are planning to camp out in internationally secured sites in Haiti.

Altogether a dozen devotees will be starting off the project, and will later be joined by congregational devotees from the Dominican Republic and other countries.

Your donations are crucial. 200 meals can be served for as little as $50. Please give generously. Donations can be made at:http://www.thelotustrust.org/earthquake or www.ffl.org.