[originally posted on huffingtonpost here]

Another Earth Day is here (and gone). It's probably trite to say, "Hey, every day is Earth Day, but I'll give it a go. Yes, we need to worry about Earth stuff every day, but not just because the planet is in peril — which is a pretty good reason. Think of it this way: the Earth is often metaphorically compared to our home and, as a fairly recent homeowner, I can tell you that your home needs care and feeding much, much more than once a year (my small lawn of non-pesticide laden, eco-cared-for grass and natural weeds grows really fast). It's a constant battle to keep a house running smoothly and providing for you and your family.

But let's take a business perspective. Minding your costs, taking care of your assets, figuring out and fulfilling customer needs — all part of green value creation — are best done consistently and aggressively, not just in big flashy moments of marketing excitement. The days of "plant a tree" Earth Day celebrations being the only thing companies do are over. But many execs still see green as a checkbox exercise, not a corporate mandate and core strategy — do a few things such as retrofitting a facility or putting together a CSR report and move on.

But the environmental work we have ahead of us will be hard and ongoing. Luckily, it should get easier over time. Like the "flywheel" analogy from the bestseller Good to Great, you keep pushing away, and you start to get some real momentum.

All this relates to a question I've been struggling with lately: Does it matter if a company or its execs believe in climate change and other environmental imperatives? What got me started on this weeks ago was GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz' comment that "global warming is a crock of s***." And at nearly every talk I give on green business, people at all levels in companies from CEOs down inform me that climate change is not real.

My approach in these moments has generally been to stay quiet or point out that it doesn't really matter whether you believe it or not, as long as you buy that going green is good for business. If you're still pursuing green value through, say, eco-efficiency or product innovation, then who cares what you believe. This is basically what Lutz went on to say after his more colorful remarks ("My thoughts on what has or hasn't been the cause of climate change have nothing to do with the decisions I make to advance the cause of General Motors"). This general idea that you don't really need the first half of the Green Wave (made up of natural forces/pressures and stakeholders), is a key point my co-author and I make in our book Green to Gold.

But I'm beginning to wonder.

Yes, in the short run, you can go down a profitable green path with the conviction that if enough of your stakeholders care, it's good for business. But what about in the longer-run, as the excitement that's swept the business world quiets down and we have to make this new green way of doing business work?

Innovation is hard. Creating new products and services and finding new markets for them is hard. Handling what may be a permanent rise in the cost of all commodities and thus the cost of doing business is extremely hard. Won't all these pursuits go a lot easier if there's a bit more on the line than "well, we just have to do this because our competitors are doing it and customers are asking for it"? Won't employees drive harder if they and their bosses believe the underpinnings of why it's good for business? When Shell CEO Jeroen van der Veer said recently that dealing with climate change "will be hard work and there is little time," I believe his employees appreciated the blunt honesty and could set their nose to the flywheel/grindstone.

So does belief matter? I don't have the answer, but I have my suspicions. The now oft-told green business success story of the Toyota Prius still speaks volumes — the company set out to make an environmental car. It wasn't just an efficiency pursuit, but a real belief that the 21st century needed a form of transportation that reduced environmental burden. Going forward, GM may have trouble matching Toyota's innovations if attitudes remain so different.

In the end, doesn't it hurt morale, creativity, and productivity to hear your boss say one of the biggest drivers for action is a crock?

[First published on Huffington Post]

The U.S. Senate's latest attempt at tackling climate change, the Warner-Lieberman bill, went down this month...again. The complaints of the opponents ranged from fear of higher energy prices to concerns about how the government will use the money collected when permits to emit carbon are sold. But the biggest concern seemed to be the bill's scale and supposed lack of forethought about how it will affect the economy.

Granted, enacting a giant government initiative with no real planning and no consideration for those hurt by it isn't just for invading countries. But how much of an intrusion on the economy is cap-and-trade? It's a fair question and vital to answer since even most critics admit that we will pass something under the next President (given statements made by both Senators McCain and Obama).

If we don't understand the concerns of the few, strong voices that helped sink the bill, we'll never make 60 Senators happy and get a good piece of legislation passed. The usual suspects - the conservative media (often the Wall Street Journal on this topic) and Republican Senators - have focused on the trauma the bill would cause Americans.

Let's look at their attack points.

First, energy prices will likely rise, a regressive impact. The loony Senator Inhofe - who claims global warming is a "hoax" without explaining why thousands of scientists would be in on the big con - is now lamenting a "tax on the poor" (it's nice to see the Senator worrying about those living paycheck to paycheck). The GAO did estimate that gas prices would rise 52 cents...by 2030. Two cents more per year, compared to the price increases we're already seeing from normal market forces and oil supply constraints, is not very impressive. Of course for many people, even that much is financially challenging, which is why lawmakers wanted billions sent to those hurt the most. Confusingly, the critics decried this plan as well.

So, the second line of attack. Dripping with sarcasm, the conservative press decried the hundreds of billions that will go to relief for the poor, payments to fossil-fuel industries, investments in alternative energy, and international aid. If pricing carbon causes some pain, then getting money into the hands of the people most affected, helping carbon-dependent industries "transition," and investing in alternative energy makes political and economic sense. The last, foreign aid, is about rich countries helping poorer countries adapt to the effects of treating the atmosphere as a dumping ground for carbon for decades. These spending priorities are dead on and actually answer some of criticisms as soon as they're out of skeptics' mouths.

Finally, the third major line of attack: the larger concern about messing with the economy. The whole point of cap-and-trade is to fix the largest market failure the world's ever seen - the current pricing of carbon and its impacts at zero. So of course it's an intrusion, but it uses free market forces to solve the problem. Free markets are wonderful, but there is no such thing as a large-scale market with nobody minding the store. Would the stock market work without the SEC, FASB, and some governing rules? To be fair, there's a better way to deal with the externality of carbon - tax it. But just imagine what conservative critics would say about a new tax. So cap-and-trade is the next best thing. We set the total amount of pollution, step back, and let companies compete to get rid of carbon - the cheapest, most innovative solutions win. Isn't that free enterprise at its best?

The critics are also upset that the government will auction off some of the permits instead of giving them all away. This complaint confuses me: selling the permits is much more hands-off than the government picking segments of the economy that "deserve" to pollute. In fact, not auctioning the permits penalizes the companies that already cut carbon (like DuPont, which has reduced emissions 75%). Punishing the most forward-thinking, innovative, and leanest businesses in our economy is a horrible idea. And it certainly doesn't help our national competitiveness any either.

In total, all of the opposition smacks of being ticked off about losing the "debate" on the science of climate change. Aside from ignoring that we're running out of options, they're suggesting that the shift we need will only cause harm, disregarding the companies that will make billions selling solutions to our problems (like GE or Johnson Controls) and ignoring the strong research and analysis from non-partisan sources like Lord Nicholas Stern from the London School of Economics. The Stern Review concluded that taking action on climate change is much less expensive than the damage to world economies from not taking action.

Cap-and-trade is a great way to start. But it seems that critics don't actually love, or understand, free markets as much as they say they do.

Everybody wants to reduce their carbon footprint these days. But many companies have looked to the quick fix of buying carbon offsets. While this practice may slow down as the recession continues, the debate will continue to rage about what makes a quality offset, and there's the rub.

Ideally, you want something that is measurable and legitimately reduces the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere (especially during tough times -- why spend money on something that may not accomplish what you hoped?). A number of problems crop up, though, particularly "additionality," which boils down to whether that project -- saving some land, building a wind farm, capturing methane from a pig farm, and so on -- would have happened anyway. You don't want to pay people for things they're already doing.

A group of NGOs has recently formed the Offset Quality Initiative to tackle this thorny question - that answer is still in the works. Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) went a step further and just launched a new resource for companies or individuals looking for high quality projects to invest in today. Their Carbon Offset Project List is fascinating. They've selected only 12 projects, far less than other respectable lists, such as the "Gold Standard Registry," backed by the World Wildlife Fund and the UNDP, which lists 200 projects around the world. So EDF must have narrower criteria.

So what's really interesting is what projects they do have. Except for one project, all are focused on methane capture, and 10 of the 12 are landfill projects (the lone holdout is a truck stop electrification project so truckers don't have to idle - very cool). Many common options are not on the list - wind, solar, retrofit projects (basically changing lightbulbs), planting trees, and so on.

I asked EDF why the methane obsession. In short, they were a) looking at the longest-standing projects with solid track records and and b) focusing on measurable and verifiable proof of reductions. They felt that "grid-connected" projects such as wind power represented a different category of renewable projects, not offsets exactly.

All of this debate demonstrates how hard it is to really define an offset...which makes claiming credit for it and declaring yourself "carbon-neutral" very dicey. Reducing carbon to "zero" is the ultimate goal here, but there are no shortcuts.

Companies can tackle this problem with a basic hierarchy of priorities. Much like the "reduce, reuse, recycle" mantra for waste, we need a simple plan for addressing carbon in business. First, cut emissions directly through efficiency and smart redesign of processes and products (and this will reduce costs directly, a good thing in tight times). Second, buy renewable directly for your facilities, including solar, wind, geothermal and, yes, local landfill gas - whatever works in your region and climate. Then, as a last resort, look for quality offsets.

Some companies are following this prescription already. Dell recently announced that it hit its carbon-neutrality target (for its offices and employee travel). The company reduced emissions, bought direct renewable energy for its headquarters from a Waste Management landfill project, then made some investments in renewables elsewhere to offset the rest.

I'm searching for a catchy three-word slogan for this path. How about Eliminate energy waste, generate your own Electrons from renewables, and Equalize your emissions with offsets? Or Bring down energy use, Build your own, Buy offsets? (Clearly, it's not easy to come up with a Tom Friedman-esque shorthand for something...send me ideas...)

In the meantime, at least the information on what makes for a quality offset is getting better. Very smart people are exploring the problem, which will only get more acute as more carbon markets spring into being. When there's a price on a reduction, you can bet someone will want to define it. Nonetheless, start now by bringing your own emissions down and building your own renewables; these are cleaner options.

Because not creating carbon to begin with is the highest quality "offset" around.

This post first appeared at Harvard Business Online and at Huffington Post.

The beginning of this post is here, the rest is on Huffington Post here...

This weekend, the New York Times gave Bjorn Lomborg -- the self-proclaimed "skeptical environmentalist" -- more air time. Lomborg wrote an op-ed that railed against those who want to cut greenhouse gas emissions dramatically. He offered his opinion on a better solution: "make low-carbon alternatives like solar and wind energy competitive with old carbon sources."

As usual, Lomborg sets up a false straw-man to knock down. He says "we are often told that...we must cut emissions immediately and drastically." Then he worries that people just don't get that we actually need to make renewables cheaper. Really? So none of the major environmental NGOs, or country delegations to global climate negotiations, have thought of that? So to tackle obesity we shouldn't just talk about weight, but also about exercising more and eating right? So insightful...

Lomborg has a long habit of tilting at windmills that he mostly imagines. His most famous argument is that we shouldn't prioritize climate change over other pressing social priorities like poverty alleviation -- as if they're all separate. The poorest people in the world are energy poor and don't have access to clean water -- the two biggest environmental challenges of our time. He's always setting up false tradeoffs to establish his more "reaonsable" middleground.

I will say that one overarching aspect of his arguments is important. Of course we should constantly ask ourselves, "What's the cheapest way to solve that problem, and where should we allocate scarce resources?"...

More on HuffPo -- please go there to comment...

[A new post on my Harvard Business column -- some interesting commentary there]

I saw an interesting piece by Michael Graham Richard on treehugger titled, "Let's Put This Meme to Rest: Global Warming — Al Gore" (thanks to Will Sarni for tweeting it to me). It seems like a perfectly obvious point, but one that I agree needs to be repeated. And it's a point that I've been making in subtle, and not-so-subtle ways, everywhere I can in recent months.

I speak to business people from a very wide range of sectors and quite often to groups that are self-identified as conservative. I find myself facing real skepticism on climate change (and real dislike of Mr. Gore). I don't really spend time debating or presenting the science, though. I just try to impress on business people to accept one irrefutable point: climate change is now a political and business reality, regardless of what you think about the scientific merits. (By the way, it is actually a reality reality also — see this unheralded story about some of the first climate refugees but never mind.)

Unfortunately, in the United States in particular, the discussion on climate change has gotten wrapped up in political affiliation. And that's due in large part to the role Al Gore has played. He's done more than anybody on the planet to raise awareness of this serious issue. But for many Americans who don't like Gore or his political party, his role as the unofficial spokesperson for climate change has tainted the discussion. It's something I understand, but wish people could get past. Why are we unable to separate the medium from the message? After all, Attila the Hun could give the Gore's Inconvenient Truth presentation and the information presented would still be true.

But at any rate, from a strategy perspective, none of this really matters — and that's what I'm consistently trying to convey to business people

See the rest of this column here

[This post originally appeared on Harvard Business Online here]

In recent months, which radical, tree-hugging group has upped the volume on pushing for action on climate change? I bet you wouldn't have guessed American military leaders. Apparently, the people standing on the proverbial (and actual) walls defending our freedoms are very concerned about the dangers our soldiers face in an uncertain, physically changing world. It's something that businesses need to pay attention to, since the military's top strategists are now getting involved in developing solutions that may well be useful to — or even critical to — individual companies' success.

Generals and admirals are now making the case that climate change is a threat to our national security. Changing regional climates, more natural disasters, and displaced peoples will force us to put troops in harm's way more frequently — and the military must be prepared.

For the leading thinking on climate and security, look no further than CNA Corporation, a think tank funded by the Pentagon, which has, in the words of the New York Times, spoken "ominously of climate change as a 'threat multiplier' that could lead to wide conflict over resources."

I recently spoke at an event in DC and sat at lunch with retired Vice Admiral Lee Gunn, the President of both CNA's Institute for Public Research and the American Security Project (ASP). In his powerful keynote address, Vice Admiral Gunn spoke about the risks global climate change presents to America. His view on the science was simple: "Some are still not convinced about the science on human-induced climate change — I am."

The Admiral laid out three large shifts in military practice and strategy that climate change will bring about:

1. Why the U.S. fights, gives aid, and responds to disasters: Natural disasters, water shortages, and the weakening of some states mean "we will deploy more often to more places."

2. How logistics patterns will change: One of our primary military bases in the Middle East, Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, is only a few feet above sea level. The physical shifts and the changes in force structure related to #1 and #2 will all be expensive.

3. What will happen to international relations: The loss of sea ice is changing commercial and military sea patterns. The Arctic represents a new area of resources for countries to potentially compete over (remember Russia planting a flag last year on the North Pole sea bed?).

[Please see the rest of the post here]

What do Exelon, Pacific Gas & Electric, PNM Resources, Apple, and Nike all have in common? In the last month they all dropped out of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over the group's stance on climate-change legislation.

Sadly, the Chamber's COO told the Wall Street Journal that these defections will not change the Chamber's misguided positions, including constant carping about the potential costs (almost always overstated) of climate change and calling for a mock "trial" on the science of climate change.

Here's why the Chamber is out to lunch. First, tackling climate change is good for business and improves the competitiveness of our industries and the country as a whole. And, oh, on a related note, the Chamber is increasingly out of step with its own members — because they do see how going green will help their businesses.

As so many companies already know, climate legislation will help our nation's businesses stay competitive on the global stage. But don't listen to me, listen to mega-venture capitalist John Doerr and GE's Jeff Immelt. The two staunch capitalists wrote a powerful op-ed in the Washington Post that laid out the series of crises we face: economic, climate, energy security, and now a "competitiveness crisis." As they put it, "this crisis is particularly evident in America's worldwide standing in the next great global industry, green technology."

Their evidence: One in ten of the world's biggest solar and wind companies are based in the U.S. We're falling behind China, Germany, and others fast. Their solution, in part: "Send a long-term signal that low-carbon energy is valuable. We must put a price on carbon and a cap on carbon emissions." With the right price signals, we invest, innovate, and move off of fossil fuels (and stop sending $700 billion every year in oil payments to countries that don't like us — but that's a separate story).

And with the right policy in place around the world, according to HSBC, climate change-related products and services will be a $2 trillion market by 2020. That's a big pie to compete for. But without the right price signals here in the U.S., we can't compete. It's as simple as that.

[See the rest of this post, and the always interesting comments whenever climate change comes up, here on Harvard Business Online]

Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt's SuperFreakonomics has certainly gotten a lot of people worked up in short order. The point of contention is a chapter about global warming which makes the case that Al Gore and others are too worried about the climate problem because the only way to solve it is to convince people to "put aside their self interest and do the right thing even if it's personally costly."

The authors go on to explain their solution -- geoengineering -- which purportedly isn't going to require us to cut back on our energy use or rethink the way we do business. But what they have completely failed to address -- and what the (ahem) lively discussions on the topic have missed as well -- is what the benefits of tackling climate change might be, instead of just the costs.

The authors have missed a major economic issue: the process of shifting to a low-carbon economy has enormous upsides completely aside from the benefits to climate balance.

I'm not going to try and take apart their arguments or judge the soundness of their climate science as a whole; there are some others who are already doing a detailed job of that. If you like your climate discussions hot and sarcastic (which can be entertaining), see Joe Romm's posts on his Climate Progress blog. Or if you like the cool, dispassionate analysis, I'd recommend the Union of Concerned Scientists or the well-respected journalist Eric Pooley's take on how the authors -- who he says are friends of his -- "flunk" the science.

There's also been a fascinating back and forth which includes the authors and Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman. In short, Krugman is not pleased and he lays out some devastating concerns about the mental exercise the authors have undertaken ("We're not talking about the ethics of sumo wrestling here; we're talking, quite possibly, about the fate of civilization. It's not a place to play snarky, contrarian games").

The brouhaha is truly unfortunate on many levels. It's not that having a discussion of geo-engineering is a bad thing -- we should explore and assess many options. But the real problem is that the authors of SuperFreakonomics -- and even the big critics who have gotten sucked into it -- seem to have taken too narrow a view of the problem. Although the authors clearly believe that there is too much climate-change hype, they seem to agree that there's a warming problem (or why propose a solution -- the main point of the chapter -- at all?). But the focus of the discussion is entirely on a way to counteract the effects of greenhouse gases, as if there are no other issues related to our reliance on fossil fuels.

Instead, let's just think about the business benefits of changing our products and processes to reduce carbon emissions, regardless of the atmospheric benefits. How will changing to a lower-carbon economy help companies? Well, there's real money involved here -- energy and other resources are getting fundamentally more expensive over time as demand around the world rises and supply gets harder to find. Oddly, the SuperFreakonomics authors acknowledge this Econ 101 supply problem in passing with the statement: "In just a few centuries, we will have burned up most of the fossil fuel that took 300 million years...to make." So why wouldn't we want to move away from a declining resource?

Put really simply, it saves money to reduce greenhouse emissions. It makes businesses more competitive to use less energy and to help customers do the same. It also creates jobs in a wide range of industries that help build a low-carbon economy -- from the obvious solar panel builders and installers to the less sexy home weatherizers, electric vehicle manufacturers and mechanics, and building efficiency consultants and experts.

The countries and companies that decouple themselves from fossil fuels will slash their costs and increase profits mightily. In fact, as Robert Kennedy, Jr. pointed out in a speech recently, the countries that have already reduced their reliance on fossil fuels -- such as Iceland, with its geothermal energy, and Sweden, with a carbon tax driving down energy use as the country grew -- have made their economies richer and more stable. (Yes, Iceland then bet its wealth on bad investments at the heart of the financial crisis in 2008 and bankrupted itself, but that's another story.)

As many have repeatedly argued, we also place ourselves at great risk globally by continuing to pour money into oil markets. We send hundreds of billions of dollars a year to parts of the world that tend to include our enemies (and is a waste of money no matter whom it goes to). And we place ourselves at personal risk -- the National Academy of Sciences just estimated, conservatively, that fossil fuels cost $120 billion per year in health costs and cause 20,000 premature deaths (that's more than six 9/11s if you're counting).

So while we find new ways to pour attention on "contrarians" and have a debate that most of the rest of the world has already stopped having, we risk our health, fall further and further behind the countries we compete with (China and Germany, for example, in renewables), and become more indebted to countries that may not be friends.

Solving climate change is not really about asking people to hold hands and sing "Kumbaya," but about political will and making it easier for business to create the low-carbon solutions we all need. Regardless of the climate science, the benefits of action and the costs of inaction for business are astronomical -- and worth superfreaking out about.

[This post first appeared on Harvard Business Online and on HuffPo -- see the comments...]

The anger and energy of the climate skeptics is at a fever pitch lately. The breaking story that the Wall Street Journal loves so much is about one climate research center in the UK that may have been unwelcoming to contrary opinions. So the conspiracy theorists are all over this and are making the case that there's a global scientific hoax. I can't stomach diving into whether one research center in the entire world acted somewhat inappropriately to shut out opposing, angry views.

But I do always find the "debate" on warming totally surreal since you don't have to buy the complicated climate models to just look out the window (proverbially). Glaciers all over the world are melting, noticeably, and quickly.

See this little video and discussion of the decline in Himalyan ice (a water source supplying over a billion people) on Climate Progress here.

I'm unclear on what people think is going on. If you put a glass of ice water outside and the ice melts, you know it's warm out there. It's really not much more complicated than that.

And yet the anger at people who want to do something about this serious problem, and even (gasp) profit from the shift, continues to rise (I've even received hate mail for fairly innocuous commentary on how good it will be for business and national competitiveness to wean ourselves off of oil and carbon).

I prefer to think that the level of animosity is a sign that the debate really is fundamentally over. This is the death throes of an outdated perspective. Let's hope it dies quickly. Let the angry, bizarre commentary begin...

For some reason I can't understand, Mr. Skeptical Environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg keeps getting space in places like the Wall Street Journal and Time to peddle his drivel. The Journal has given Lomborg a weekly op-ed for about 6 weeks to talk about how we shouldn't really tackle climate change.

Here's how each of these weekly missives work. Lomborg picks out one person in a country to talk to and asks them how much they care about climate change. Yesterday, he told us that a very poor person living near Mt. Kilimanjaro doesn't care so much about melting glaciers, but cares more about education about HIV. Last week we learned that a very poor person living near Himalayan glaciers that are melting, which will create vast water and food shortages, also cares more about pressing daily issues of local poverty. Earlier, a very poor person living in Africa told Lomborg we should tackle malaria directly rather than take on climate change. Wow, these are real surprises.

Lomborg's sole purpose in life seems to be creating false arguments that nobody is really making and then knocking them down. In the malaria article, he makes it sound like all the government, NGO, and business work to battle climate change is intended solely to stop the spread of malaria (which may become more prevalent as warmer weather makes things more hospitable to mosquitoes at higher latitudes). So, he says, the potential investment of trillions of dollars to create cleaner, more efficient economies is an expensive solution for malaria. Treated bed-nets are much cheaper.

Well, yeah, no kidding, Bjorn.

As if anyone is saying that reducing carbon is just about malaria, or water supplies in Asia, or only any one of the many specific issues Lomborg splits up into little targets and compares to the whole (inflated) price tag. And, by the way, who said that tackling climate change is separate from helping the poorest among us? The issues are all integrally related and the poorest are being hit hardest by climate changes already. Lomborg always seems to be arguing against some phantom Birkenstock-wearing Greenpeace activist chained to the bulldozer of progress...in the 1970s.

The logic and arguments for decoupling our economies from carbon have evolved tremendously and include national competitiveness and job creation, healthier air, eliminating reliance on fuels from parts of the world that fund terror, and reducing dependence on volatilely-priced, and declining, resources that will raise the cost of doing business over time. This is why many important capitalists such as Jeff Immelt at GE (but not the US Chamber of Commerce of course) are making the business case for climate action.

You'll notice that none of these other reasons actually depend on believing fully in the science. And they make for more prosperous economies, which can help the poor the most. And guess what, we have to walk and chew gum at the same time -- we have to think holistically and tackle issues in a synchronized way.

But overall, what I really love is Bjorn Lomborg taking his argument for helping the poor to the skeptics of the world and going through the Wall Street Journal -- as if this is the crowd lining up to send development money to countries for food, water, and bed nets. Who is he speaking to?

Perhaps the real question here is this: What the heck is wrong with the Wall Street Journal? Today, they pick up Lomborg's arguments hook-line-and-sinker and offer an assemblage of greatest hits on not taking action. But yesterday was really hilarious.

They printed one op-ed -- in a series of daily, relentless lamenting about climate science -- laying out how climate skeptic bloggers (who almost all have no climatology or geology or any -ology background) have dismantled the idea that the actual measured data show an increase in GHG gases (the famous "hockey stick" chart) or any warming at all. Yet, in the same issue of the paper, the WSJ printed a truly helpful, excellent article looking at the main arguments/myths from the skeptics and comparing them to what the scientific community is really saying. The very first comparison is this one...

WHAT THE SKEPTICS SAY: The Earth isn't warming -- at least not to any extent that could actually be called a "crisis." And some data even suggest that the Earth is getting colder. The planet may have grown warmer over the course of the 20th century. But that warming stopped more than 10 years ago, and since 1998 the trend shows less warming or even cooling...

THE RESPONSE: It's true: By most measures, average temperatures this decade seem to have plateaued. But this isn't evidence of a cooling planet. Partly, it's a result of picking an exceptionally hot year -- 1998 -- as a starting point..the long-term trend since the mid-1970s shows warming per decade of about 0.18 degree Celsius (about 0.32 degree Fahrenheit)...The '00s still have been exceptionally warm: The 12 years from 1997 through 2008 were among the 15 warmest on record, and the decade itself was hotter than any previous 10-year period. While 2008 was the coolest year since 2000 -- a result of the cooling counterpart of El Niño -- it was still the 11th-warmest year on record. And 2009 is on track to be among the five warmest.

The Journal is as schizophrenic as the population I suppose, but the op-ed pages are totally out to lunch. We need good reporting now about what we know, and what we don't -- not ideological blustering. And we need to stop creating false tradeoffs between helping the poor and helping the planet, as if the poor -- and all of us -- don't live and breathe on that planet.

This first appeared on Huffington Post.

[If this was forwarded to you and you'd like to sign up for Andrew's blog via email, click here]

Just a quick link to my monthly e-letter. This one is a bit different. I look at four (of many possible) scenarios for business after the big climate talks in Copenhagen. For each I give a quick rundown of what the world will look like and how business might need to respond.

http://www.sustainablelifemedia.com/files/webform/documents/ecoadvantagestrategies12072009.htm

Also, a note on my last post. I think many of you did not receive it as I changed the name of the RSS feed and didn't realize it would mess up delivery. I've changed it back until I figure out a better way to migrate the name. To sign up for my blog via email, click here.

So here's the link to my last post on some of the absurdity in the climate discussions lately.

NEWS FLASH FROM BJORN LOMBORG AND THE WSJ: WE SHOULD HELP POOR PEOPLE

Happy New Year all (ok, I'm a bit delayed, but I entered the new year and promptly got really sick -- lost over a week in there). So let's start fresh now!

Anyway, I took a bit of time at the end of 2009 and early 2010, with a couple weeks' perspective, to think about the stories that really grabbed me in 2009. The top 10 is below, but see my brief write-ups and logic on each at my e-letter site here.

1) Copenhagen fails or does it?
2) The debate over climate science rages on (in the U.S. at least)
3) The EPA steps in
4) Wal-Mart keeps the pressure up (and saves the rainforest?)
5) Domino's employees deliver a new kind of openness.
6) IBM starts building a "smarter planet"
7) GM goes bankrupt
8) Some of our biggest capitalists get serious about carbon
9) China emerges as a green tech leader and the world's biggest emitter
10) The bottom of the pyramid becomes a source of innovation

And the bonus, theater of the absurd, wacky story...
10 1/2) Forbes names Exxon green company of the year

[A post from December from Harvard Business that i forgot to post here...but it's still timely!]

No matter what happens in Copenhagen, or in the follow up meetings in Mexico and elsewhere, the world is warming. It's happening today, and even the majority of skeptics seem to agree on that point (often the debate is whether humans are behind it and how much money we should invest in "fixing" the problem). But the very real changes we're already seeing are prompting many in the climate-watching world to talk about not just reductions in emissions but "adaptation."

What used to be seen as a dirty and defeatist word is now a central discussion point, even in Copenhagen. The G77 (the developing world) is demanding significant aid from the rich countries not to help them combat climate change, but to help them adapt to it. Just a couple weeks ago, President Obama said he sensed some consensus around mobilizing "$10 billion a year by 2012 to support adaptation and mitigation in developing countries."

Given the cold reality of a warming planet, adaptation is now a strategic issue for countries and companies alike (whether or not they realize it). The changing climate can mean many things, but includes, according to an important report from the state of California, threats to ocean and coastal resources and land, water management challenges, major changes to agriculture, and stress on transportation and energy infrastructure. In California alone, $2.5 trillion of assets will be exposed to extreme weather and wildfires, costing many billions a year.

For companies the same basic issues apply. Specific industries, such as agriculture, face massive change. But all companies will find impacts up and down their value chains from weather, changing water availability, and temperature shifts. But just laying out doom scenarios and risks doesn't help much. So let's look at a couple of excellent (and short) reports on adaptation and business.

Some big institutional investors, with the guidance of the consultant Acclimatise, recently released "Managing the Unavoidable" (register for free to download it here or get the similar 2008 report on similar topic here). A few key findings struck me as dead on and important:

1. Climate change adaptation is starting to receive more management attention but management systems and processes are much less developed than those for climate change mitigation. Basically, most companies are not thinking about this, with a few exceptions — Coke comes to mind since it's been mapping water availability for years. But they are in the minority.

2. There appear to be significant weaknesses in companies' risk assessment processes. They say that "incremental changes are being under-emphasized" (we all focus on extreme weather events rather than 'creeping' changes) and "indirect impacts on business models are being neglected" (we focus on risks to our own fixed assets and haven't looked at supply chain disruptions). Meaning, even if you don't think you rely on water in an arid region, someone in your supply chain might.

3. Companies are more concerned about risks than opportunities. While it may seem cold to talk about how to profit from a warming planet, it's a reality that there will be winners in this. More importantly, we actually need companies to pursue solutions to greatly reduce human misery. And, yes, there will be profits.

And this brings me to the second report that's worth a look. "The New Adaptation Marketplace" from global NGO Oxfam lays out some helpful categories and sample companies that stand to profit from the changes to come. These include, water management (Pentair, Siemens), energy supply (GE), insurance (Swiss Re), climate change information and consulting services (ICF International), and of course agriculture projects (CH2M Hill).

On the last one, consider one of my clients, Bayer, which has a sizable crop sciences business. In its last annual report, Bayer identified drought-tolerant plants as a major investment opportunity. Clearly, the world needs to keep food volumes growing, even on a dryer, warmer planet. The companies that can solve this kind of problem will grow and win share.

Or think of the more extreme needs that might arise and the entrepreneurial opportunities. As some smart people have pointed out, cutting carbon won't be enough — we'll need to drag it out of the sky. Imagine what new technologies we'll need to do that.

From my conversations with Oxfam, clients, and other corporations, I can tell you that most organizations — including ones that already have products that will help with adaptation — are not yet thinking clearly about the risks and opportunities from climate change. Are you?

It's been a couple months since the global climate negotiations in Copenhagen. Whether you're a fan of a global cap on carbon emissions or not, it's important to think about what COP15's failure means (that a global agreement is going to be unlikely in the near term) and what it doesn't mean for business (that companies will be off the hook for tackling carbon emissions).

The climate negotiations brought together committed activists and world leaders, but led almost nowhere; instead, the gathering only highlighted and revealed some major structural hurdles getting in the way of a multinational agreement.

So it might seem that near-term regulatory or policy pressure on companies is unlikely. But actually there are some significant sub-national initiatives affecting business as usual that every company should know about. The pressure to measure, be transparent about, and reduce carbon is still on.

First, even without a global carbon trading system, other major multinational cap-and-trade systems are in place or in the works, including the EU's trading program, which has already been running for a few years. In North America, three separate carbon trading programs are in the process of setting regional caps covering states that include half the U.S. population (and provinces with three-quarters of Canada's). And city-level initiatives like the Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement are driving new local rules and fomenting competition among municipalities to cut emissions.

Second, within the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency is not sitting idly by either. The series of climate-related rules that the powerful EPA has announced in the last year began with the National Climate Reporting Plan, which forces the largest 10,000 facilities in the country to measure and report their carbon emissions. This new system has much in common with the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), a very public, and mandatory, database of toxic pollution by facility mandated by the federal government in the 1980s. TRI raised awareness within companies about their own footprints and drove aggressive efforts to reduce toxic pollution (along with cost and risk) that continue to this day. The same awakening about the carbon pollution companies cause -- and the financial costs of this form of waste -- even without an agreement from Copenhagen..

Going well beyond the regulated transparency of the reporting plan, the EPA recently declared greenhouse gases a public health threat. After a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that basically said CO2 could be regulated, the EPA's "endangerment finding" was no surprise. What's still unknown is what it will mean for business.

So far, virtually all the action -- from the regional trading schemes to new EPA rules -- has been aimed mainly at utilities and the biggest factories. What does all this activity mean for the average company?

The caps and efforts to reduce utility emissions could result in higher energy prices. Any business that, well, uses electricity will be affected. And the EPA's intentions for the longer term, while up in the air, are getting clearer. There is almost no chance that forced transparency for the big guys is the end of what the EPA will do. One glimmer of what will come: rules newly proposed in 2009 (in conjunction with the Department of Transportation) to reduce emissions from light-duty vehicles.

The bottom line is that business must still plan for rising restrictions on greenhouse gases by legislative means or by regulation. Despite the confounded state of international climate policy negotiations, companies will continue to face new mandates to measure, report, and reduce their carbon emissions.

[This post originally appeared on Harvard Business Review]

What do you call a group that uses large snowstorms to deride the scientific evidence for climate change? Fox News I guess.

The absurdity of pointing out that there's snow in the winter -- in one part of the world mind you -- and using that to say that climate change is a hoax is breathtaking.

Especially when, at the same time, Vancouver is shipping in snow for the Olympics...you see, some places get more snow, some get less. That's weather, not climate.

Anyway, if you don't laugh, you cry. Only comedy can do justice to this insane line of logic.

The Daily Show points out that it's hot in Australia...

...and Colbert make the logical extension that when it's dark, the sun must have been destroyed.

I must have done something wrong to someone today because I feel like I'm in some kind of surreal dream. The day started well with a great event hosted by Xerox in Dallas, talking sustainability with some leaders in the field. Then I ended up in two bizarre conversations during my travels home. This post is my personal therapy session to work it out.

First scene: In a car to the airport with a senior exec from IBM who basically leads the company's very successful "Smarter Planet" projects with customers (helping companies and cities with traffic flow, water management, carbon reduction, etc, etc).

The car service had provided us Ford Excursion -- from a sustainability event -- so that should've been my first tip on something being awry in the universe. Anyway, my colleague and I are talking about green, climate, the inexplicable vitriol and anger of climate deniers, Al Gore, etc. And the driver looks in the rear-view mirror and intiaties this conversation.

Driver: (Laughing): You guys don't believe this climate hoax do you?
Me: (Also laughing) Are you kidding? You're kidding right?
Driver: No, you know, it's a hoax
Me: (Not laughing) Why do you think that?
Driver: There's no evidence.
Me: Actually there's massive evidence, decades of it in fact [see a cool video on the basics of the incontrovertible science and physics of it all here...]
Driver: (Arrogantly) What about those climate emails? Those didn't happen?
Me: Yes, they happened, but they didn't disprove the decades of science.
Driver: They falsified records
Me: Actually they didn't. You should read some of the emails — they didn't falsify records at all.

End scene.

I really had to wonder what kind of small, tiny bubble of friends and media consumption you have to live in to find it astonishing to meet people who believe the 95% of scientists that see climate change as a real problem. Disagreeing with that view is one thing, but laughing at people like they're aliens is another and shows me just how divided we've become where we can surround ourselves with echo chambers...

On to conversation #2

I'm minding my own business on my flight home and right when we're getting ready to land (I almost made it), my seat-mate decides to strike up a conversation (it's always dangerous when they make you turn off electronics — so much silence to fill). Here's conversation #2.

Guy on Plane (I'll shorten that to GOP): What do you do?
Me: Work with companies on environmental issues, speak, write, consult, helping them with green business strategy (ya da ya da)
GOP: You mean recycling? (my first clue this was not going to go well most likely)
Me: No, a whole range of things from product development and innovation to c-level strategy to executive education and training what do you do?
GOP: I'm in the energy business. Private equity investments.
Me: Oh, what kind?
GOP: Oil, gas, coal — really diversified
Me: No renewables investments?
GOP: No, we don't invest in things that need government subsidies. Wind and solar and such are so uneconomic. [here's where I want to point to an article I just saw today about governments spending $500 billion on fossil fuel subsidies]
Me: Huh.
GOP: We do some work educating. We have a site, plantsneedCO2. We educate government people on what CO2 is. [It's here where I discovered that at 10pm after a long day I didn't even have the energy to ask, "oh, what does CO2 do?" — but check out the site. It's real and informs us that we need MORE CO2 not less.]

The conversation went on, but that's about all I can stomach to convey. I seem to have run out of steam to have a discussion with people who are this far gone. Bring on legitimate debate about what to do about the challenges we all face, or about the right policies and government action (or whether government or markets alone should do it). But people like this cannot have a real conversation. I just wonder what I did to deserve running into two in short order.

Thanks for listening. Deep breaths.
Onward...

We are coming out of our long, national nightmare. One of the dirtiest political fights in memory is over (sort of). But if you think the health care debate got rough, wait until President Obama and Congress turn to energy and climate -- which they're most definitely going to do.

You see, the worst claims about health care -- that it's a huge expansion of government power or, okay, let's say it, a plot to kill Grandma -- were never based in reality. What we've ended up with is actually a fairly mild bill, including access to coverage for millions more people and restrictions on the harshest practices of insurance companies. But it's not remotely a government program. The so-called "public option" did not even end up in the bill. There is no new giant government health care program beyond the existing giant government health care programs that people seem to love (like Medicare).

But putting a price on carbon and changing our energy mix over the next generation? That kind of law will be a large program by definition. To tackle an economic externality -- those pesky costs to society that are not currently priced into markets -- you do have to get muddy, and it most likely will entail an awful lot of mud-slinging.

So many of the complaints about a cap-and-trade law that we will hear over the coming months will be different from the health care claims in one very important aspect: they will actually have some basis in reality. A cap will affect the cost of all energy and thus all aspects of our lives. It will, for some, raise the cost of doing business. There will be winners and very definable losers in a new energy and carbon regime. When it comes right down to it, there will be blood.

Those who produce mainly fossil fuels could be in trouble. Businesses that operate inefficiently will see their costs rise -- fast -- compared to the competition's. Companies that stick with a portfolio of less sustainable, more energy-intensive products -- anywhere in their value chain -- will face life-threatening challenges (think GM in 2008 when oil hit $145 a barrel).

I believe strongly that decoupling our economy from carbon will benefit us greatly (regardless of the debate on climate change). The benefits include...

• lowering our costs and increasing our profitability and resilience

• costing much less than inaction on climate (see the famous Stern Report for the macro-economics on this)

• reducing our reliance on fuels from parts of the world that fund our enemies

• making us healthier as we reduce air pollutants

• making us more competitive globally in the great race to multi-trillion-dollar environmental technology markets

Those impacts will not be felt equally across all aspects of the global economy. As we invest in efficiency, the sector that provides our energy will not fare well if it doesn't adapt. But the general position of organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that climate action is bad for business is absurd; these groups are placing the interests of one sector -- albeit a large and powerful one -- against the interests of all the others that will benefit from higher efficiency and lower operating costs.

So, in the place of death panels killing grandma, we'll have stories of how high energy prices will make heating homes in winter expensive... and, you guessed it, kill grandma. These arguments will ignore the countervailing levers of energy efficiency, retrofits, and weatherizing that will lower energy costs overall. And instead, we will hear (mostly made up) stories of businesses that will go under from new carbon laws.

But in this case, unlike with health care scare tactics, there will be some gems of truth hidden in the argument. So, yes, it will get ugly, but I have hope today that the forces of reason -- and the voices of the companies representing literally trillions in revenue that want climate action and more regulatory and market certainty -- can win out.

[This post originally appeared on Harvard Business Online]

On the heels of one of the most active weeks in Presidential history, President Obama has confounded his supporters on the green side of the spectrum and opened up major areas of the U.S. coastline to offshore oil drilling.

The reaction to the decision has been in some cases predictable, but often surprising -- the New York Times came out in favor today. Of course key environmental leaders are dismayed (see this helpful, quality debate on the Times blog featuring varying perspectives from leading thinkers).

But I've been scratching my head and I'll admit that I'm completely confused by this decision, or at least by its timing. I can only come up with a few plausible reasons the President would support this, but none make real sense to me. Please comment and offer other reasons. Here are some lines of logic that some may support...

Answer One: President Obama, like all politicians, is 'in the pocket' of big oil and big industry.

This is way too easy an answer and is just part of the 'a pox on both your houses' attitude that's growing in the country. Yes, all politicians are beholden in different ways to different donor groups, but I don't think anybody can say with a straight face that Obama has tried to do just what some industries and donors want.

Answer Two: This is a political maneuver to buy Republican (and energy-state Dems) to the coming climate and energy bill debate.

This answer has the most currency right now. But I have two problems with its logic. First, the timing is odd. Why announce you're giving up one of your better negotiating positions before the real climate debate heats up? Why not hold that in reserve to get those votes you need? Or -- if can go out on a naive imaginary limb here -- why not hold it over the oil companies' heads to get some concessions -- like much higher fees for access, reduced subsidies elsewhere for fossil fuels, or demanding that they stop spending money on undermining climate science.

The timing just seems oddly nonstrategic, but, as environmental strategist Will Sarni pointed out (via a mini Facebook debate amongst my colleagues), it's just like the public option in health care -- Obama gave it up early on.

Second, and this should be obvious given the way health care went, Obama is not going to get any Republican votes on anything -- Senator McCain made that pretty clear by stating recently, "There will be no cooperation for the rest of the year." So maybe Obama is looking to shore up weak support for cap-and-trade in the Democratic ranks -- that makes some sense.

(As a funny side note on politics, has anyone noticed that he's opened up drilling pretty much around Republican stronghold red states? It's as if he's saying, "ok, you want a world of 'drill, baby, drill'? Then you can have it on your coastlines.")

Answer Three: The President and his Interior Secretary Ken Salazar actually believe this is a good decision and will help us achieve a measure of energy independence.

This answer actually seems the most believable to me, but it seems even more odd. I'm going to vastly oversimplify the economics and market structure of fuels here, but isn't oil fundamentally a fungible, global commodity? Meaning, even if we dig off our own shores, it's not exactly like it comes only to us. We're not operating a state-run oil company. If ExxonMobil digs up the oil, it basically enters the global market, continuing our addiction to oil and propping up what Thomas Friedman calls the "petro-dictators" around the world.

And even if the oil only came to our refineries and cars, there's nowhere near enough oil out there to make us independent anyway. True energy independence -- if that's even a worthy goal -- is only feasible through distributed generation, meaning a solar panel on every roof and wind turbine in every neighborhood. That's the energy shift we need to be moving toward as fast as possible, so I hope we use the rights and tax revenue to help support renewable energy.

In the end, I suppose this decision came from a bit of all three (and mostly the latter two). I welcome your comments on other plausible reasons, and please let me know if my Econ 101 assessment of global oil markets is fundamentally off-base.

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Earth Day week is filled with announcements, events, and parties -- way too much for any one person to follow. I spent the week in DC, speaking at the EPA, moderating a plenary session at the Creating Climate Wealth event (from the Carbon War Room), and then ending my time with a White House reception for Earth Day -- which was awe-inspiring, frankly, as I had never been to the White House and that whole "leader of the free world thing" is fairly impressive.

I wanted to share some random snippets of interesting things I heard along the way...

- In preparing for the EPA speech, I read EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson's speech from last month at the National Press Club. Please read it. It's about innovation and a new kind of regulatory approach. Key quote: "I'm done with the false choice between the economy and the environment."

At the Creating Climate Wealth Conference...
- Kathleen Rogers, President of Earth Day Network: "the theme of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day is green business"

- Jigar Shah, CEO of the Carbon War Room: "Energy waste and illogical decision-making are huge wealth-creating opportunities", "Climate change is not a sacrifice...it's not like the 70s where we ask, 'what are we willing to pay for clean water', but it's now 'What are we willing to do as a species [to build a better world] for our children and grandchildren?'"

The panel I moderated included Sir Richard Branson, former Costa Rican President Jose Maria Figueres, Waste Management CEO Dave Steiner, Pegasus Capital founder Craig Cogut, and Sara Greenstein, a top exec from Underwriters' Laboratories...

- Sir Branson: "Protecting natural resources and reducing carbon emissions are the greatest entrepreneurial opportunity in history"; "We can't rely on 'the end is nigh' language...it's not nigh if we all work together to scale up low-carbon solutions"

- President Figueres: "There is no planet B!". In politics, he said, "The long-term perspective is the next election. The short-term is the next poll." In Costa Rica, he had a single term, by law, so he was able to pass a carbon tax in the 1990s! And on land-based carbon assets..."As long as the price of a tree standing is less than the price of a tree cut for timber, we won't save the forests."

- Dave Steiner described the 4.5 lbs of waste we each produce...every day. He said it's all carbon really as it breaks down into methane. Waste Management now powers 1 million homes with methane gas.

- Craig Cogut described one seemingly 'boring' business he's invested in that replaces shipping pallets with more sustainable alternatives. Some of the biggest food companies and retailers are signed on.

- Sara Greenstein explained the role UL plays in setting standards around the world (every U.S. home has 100+ UL labels on products). The company began by setting a standard for how light bulbs should work at the World's Fair they were introduced at (in the 1890s). In essence, it's going to be hard to launch and scale new technologies -- like a smart grid -- without some agreement on standards and certifications to ensure the whole system works

At the evening event at the conference, Branson spoke again, but we also heard from the former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, about climate justice, as well as speeches from the founder of Earth Day, Dennis Hayes, and the Secretary of Commerce, Gary Locke. A couple gems...

- Dennis Hayes told us that a National Academy of Sciences study said there was enough evidence of climate change to start working on constraining CO2 emissions...in 1979. Sigh.

- Secretary Locke: "The Chinese are spending $9B a month on the clean economy...the longer we wait, the further behind we fall to China, Spain, Germany."

Another panel on the 2nd day of the conference featured Reed Hundt, former head of the FCC; Reid Detchon, VP of Energy and Climate at the UN Foundation; and Sunil Paul, a leading cleantech venture capitalist and founder of Spring Ventures. Some very interesting stats from them...

- Reed Hundt talked about the investment in and creation of mobile and data networks. Between 1997 and 2007, the private sector -- without any government money -- spend nearly $1 trillion. Hundt said that "if we spent the same amount in the same time period [on clean energy], we'd have a 100% clean grid." He also talked about the need for long-term low-cost financing (this is where govt can help) and his Coalition for Green Capital.

- Reid Detchon, talked about California's holding flat the energy use/person over years vs. the constant rise everywhere else in the country. The 'wedge' between those two trends "is expense and cost."

- Sunil Paul had a bunch of great stats on scale of the challenge to take billions of tons of carbon out of the atmosphere (and he launched the Gigaton Throwdown to tackle the problem). By his calculation, we need about $8.4 trillion investment in the next 10 years to reach the climate stabilization goals scientists tells us we need. And the capital has to come from the private sector which has $125 trillion in assets (vs. $300 billion in philanthropy and $18 trillion in government). And finally, from Sunil, a thought on making new technologies easy and scalable..."saving the world should be mundane."

Overall, Creating Climate Wealth, and much of the discussion I heard around Earth Day in D.C. was about business and growth. Clearly Earth Day has expanded its reach from being a personal protest mission for millions of Americans to being a chance to step back and think and talk about what kind of world we want. Let's hope the conversation continues.

In case you missed it, Senator Lindsay Graham, who has been a lone voice of reason on climate from the right side of the aisle, has threatened to derail the climate discussion and the bill that's supposedly coming out this week (some elements of the bill, as described by Senator Kerry, here). His problem is the Democrats' sudden interest in putting immigration issues in the forefront.

So, is he brave because he's saying, "Enough delay on climate, let's get going on legislation"? Or is he being an arse (in nicer British terms) by putting his feelings/agenda first and threatening an entire legislative discussion that the world is depending on?

As my colleague Will Sarni says, Graham's "brave to balk, an arse to withdraw."
I tend to agree -- it's a bit of both. But I'm (naively and optimistically) leaning toward brave. The fact is, I sort of agree. The administration has put health care, financial reform, jobs, nuclear disarmament, and a few other things ahead of pushing through an energy and climate bill. Those other priorities are all important, but we missed the international deadline in December which derailed the Copenhagen meetings. It's time to act now before the 2010 election.

Who knows what all this maneuvering means for business. I think most companies are still expecting climate regulations in the coming years, but the timing and specifics continue to be up in the air.

Your thoughts?

Al Gore wrote an article in the New Republic this week making an interesting connection between the oil spill and the continuing polluting of our atmosphere with carbon dioxide (thanks to Jason Scott for sending me the link).

I suggest everyone read this piece. It's an important wake-up call. Here are a couple of the most cogent quotes. First, comparing the spill to the CO2 "spill" into the atmosphere...

The continuing undersea gusher of oil 50 miles off the shores of Louisiana is not the only source of dangerous uncontrolled pollution spewing into the environment. Worldwide, the amount of man-made CO2 being spilled every three seconds into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding the planet equals the highest current estimate of the amount of oil spilling from the Macondo well every day. Indeed, the average American coal-fired power generating plant gushes more than three times as much global-warming pollution into the atmosphere each day—and there are over 1,400 of them.

Second, the reason we have so much trouble understanding the climate issue...

One important difference between the oil spill and the CO2 spill is that petroleum is visible on the surface of the sea and carries a distinctive odor now filling the nostrils of people on shore. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, is invisible, odorless, tasteless, and has no price tag. It is all too easily put “out of sight and out of mind.” Because the impacts of global warming are distributed globally, they often masquerade as an abstraction. And because the length of time between causes and consequences is longer than we are used to dealing with, we are vulnerable to the illusion that we have the luxury of time before we begin to respond.

I also read last night the first chapter of Bill McKibben's very important new book, Eaarth. It's a long look at what's happening to the planet today. As McKibben says, climate change is not a future threat, or a threat of any kind...it's reality. We're living on a new planet, he says, and it's not one we're used to. I can't do justice to all the facts he throws into the ring, so I'll just say, please read this book. I'll likely come back to this when I finish the whole thing (which I sure hope will get more positive).

We all need to get more educated on the nature of the challenge and look facts in the eye...

[This appeared first on my Harvard Business Review blog]

Pepsi recently demonstrated its commitment to reducing its environmental impacts up and down the value chain with two rapid-fire announcements about new initiatives. The old-school approach to greening is to focus on operations within the proverbial "four walls." But Pepsi, like other leaders, is approaching sustainability more holistically, with much greater impact.

I recently spoke with Tim Carey, Pepsi's Director of Sustainability for Beverages in the Americas, about two big initiatives in which he's playing a key role.

First, on the downstream side, Pepsi looked for ways to raise the recycling rate of beverage containers from a relatively paltry 34% to 50% or higher. Working with GreenOps, a division of Waste Management, Pepsi launched a new program called "Dream Machine." These "reverse" vending machines, now being placed in high-traffic areas such as gas stations and stadiums, take back those often-abandoned and often-unrecycled empty bottles and give users points toward rewards from sponsors or local merchants.

But Pepsi has gone beyond those relatively minor incentives to add on a social mission. The program will also help fund Pepsi's donation to a group called Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities (EBV), which trains vets at business schools around the country. Pepsi expects that the combined immediate points and larger mission will drive new, greener customer behaviors — and help solve one of the beverage industry's most intractable value chain problems.

Second, Pepsi has embarked on a very unusual supply chain effort to reduce the carbon emissions associated with its Tropicana orange juice. After conducting a full life-cycle analysis of the product line, the company was relatively surprised to find that the biggest portion of the carbon footprint was found not in manufacturing, or distribution, but actually back in the agriculture stage — primarily the result of the heavily natural-gas dependent process of making fertilizer (see chart).

The analysis showed Pepsi execs where the largest impacts were, and thus where they'd get the biggest bang for their buck on carbon reductions. The company started working with suppliers and farmers to find new ways to make and apply fertilizer. For example, instead of using natural gas from as far away as Russia (which then requires shipping heavy fertilizer across the world), Pepsi is using biomass from closer to home. Wood waste and agricultural by-products are two sources, but execs are hopeful they can also use the large number of their own orange rinds left over in manufacturing, which would fully close the loop.

The company is also working with scientists on the root chemistry of orange trees, applying fungi and bacteria to increase the uptake of nutrients. All that techno-speak means that the trees will need less fertilizer in total, which means less manufacturing and shipping of that fertilizer and, voila, a smaller footprint.

A 100-acre test run of these new methods of working with new, low-carbon fertilizer is underway. A few years from now, Pepsi and its suppliers will know what's working and what isn't.

But here's the best part: the cost of these changes to consumers and growers will be about zero. And it had to be. Let's face it, this kind of carbon reduction isn't easy to convey to consumers, so the market benefit may be small for now. So the sustainability team needed to find ways to lower the fertilizer footprint without causing any additional cost to suppliers or farmers. How did they do it?

By focusing its efforts on the real footprint — identified through a solid lifecycle analysis and good data — Pepsi found the approach with the highest payback. As sustainability exec Tim Carey put it, "It's not unusual to spend tens of millions of dollars removing some carbon from a manufacturing process at returns that can be 10% or less...or we can take 15% of total carbon out in the fertilizer step without costing anything."

The impacts of these tests — and future rollout — will not be small; Pepsi buys a fairly shocking one-third of the Florida orange harvest. And the recycling work could shift millions of bottles out of landfills. Pepsi's full value chain view on sustainability is deep green stuff — this is how you implement green thinking.

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I'm really not one to pile on the President for perceived failings. God knows he has a tough job. And after all, let's remember what the alternative to Obama could be, or what came before.

But tonight's speech on the oil spill was a real disappointment for those who believe a clean energy future is perhaps the only path to job growth, public health, national greatness, and freedom (from dependence on a ecologically and economically destructive fossil fuels).

The President showed that he gets how big a mess the Gulf is and he's changing leadership at the agency that oversees the industry. That's all well and good.

But when it came to reducing the future risk of these kinds of catastrophes, the prescriptions were in short supply. Obama called for accelerating the transition to a clean economy. That's fantastic. But how can we possibly move fast without a price on carbon? (Uber-capitalists John Doerr (Kleiner Perkins) and Jeff Immelt (GE) said it best in "Falling Behind in Green Tech")

How could Obama not use this opportunity to call on us to do some hard things? Imagine if he had asked us to use less oil, accept higher prices for fossil fuels, support legislators that make the hard calls (raising people's gas prices is about the hardest thing a politician can do).

After 9/11, it's been said many times, President Bush only asked us to shop...and nothing else. Obama seems to be making the same mistake.

He did suggest we need a moon shot to get to clean energy and get off the oil. And he harkened back to America's ability to build tanks and planes in WWII. But those examples of American success are 40 and 70 years ago.

What's scary about the speech tonight is that it almost could've been any President in the last four decades. They've all sat in the Oval Office and said 'never again' and 'we're going to find a new energy future.' And yet, here we are, using more fossil fuels than ever.

In the end, the President suggested we all "pray" for courage and the people of the Gulf.

It's truly a shame that that's the only thing he asked us to do.