wrdforwrd

Like a mixed green salad, GreenBiz Group‘s fifth annual 2012 State of Green Business report offers a jumbled view of the current green and sustainable business landscape.

“Things aren’t going as well as we’d hoped,” said Joel Makower, principal author of the 84-page report. “For the first time since we began doing our assessment, in 2008, several of the indicators have taken a downward turn.”

Each year GreenBiz examines sustainable business by tracking 20 indicators of progress that measure such things as carbon emissions, e-waste recycling, green office space, vehicle fleet emissions, toxic emissions, energy efficiency, employee commuting, corporate reporting, and a dozen other metrics. Read the rest of this entry »

A pox on both their houses. Legal battles surrounding the Deepwater Horizon 2010 drilling disaster will be just as messy—and way lengthier—than the spill incident itself.

The latest shots in what bids to be a never-ending exercise in passing the buck and liability were fired last month when oil giant BP went to court in New Orleans claiming that the U.S. contractor Halliburton (you know – Iran, Dick Cheney? That Halliburton) botched the cement work on the doomed oil rig. Read the rest of this entry »

I believe it is. Police can break up the various “Occupy” camps across the country, but they can’t break the movement. As disorganized, disparate and disheveled as some would like to believe Occupy Wall Street and its regional allies are, the barn door is open and the horse is romping freely in the field.

This could well be the early stages of a new progressive movement, according to Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. The Occupy gatherings “are most likely the start of a new era in America,” he wrote in a recent New York Times article.

“Historians have noted that American politics moves in long swings,” he continued. “We are at the end of the 30-year Reagan era, a period that has culminated in soaring income for the top 1 percent and crushing unemployment or income stagnation for much of the rest. The overarching challenge of the coming years is to restore prosperity and power for the 99 percent.”

The roots of today’s crises of vast income and wealth inequality, corporate dominance and feckless, inept elected leaders lie with the direction that Reagan took the nation – making government the problem, slashing taxes for the rich along with outlays on public services and infrastructure investment, and sweeping deregulation.

“Reagan’s was a fateful misdiagnosis,” Sachs says. “He completely overlooked the real issue — the rise of global competition in the information age — and fought a bogeyman, the government. Decades on, America pays the price of that misdiagnosis, with a nation singularly unprepared to face the global economic, energy and environmental challenges of our time.”

And yet Washington “still channels Reaganomics… Both parties have joined in crippling the government in response to the demands of their wealthy campaign contributors, who above all else insist on keeping low tax rates on capital gains, top incomes, estates and corporate profits. Corporate taxes as a share of national income are at the lowest levels in recent history. Rich households take home the greatest share of income since the Great Depression.”

The American people are waking up and the OWS movement wants to challenge and change the channel of inequality.

“Following our recent financial calamity, a third progressive era is likely to be in the making,” Sachs writes. “This one should aim for three things. The first is a revival of crucial public services, especially education, training, public investment and environmental protection. The second is the end of a climate of impunity that encouraged nearly every Wall Street firm to commit financial fraud. The third is to re-establish the supremacy of people votes over dollar votes in Washington.”

Sachs says the people in Zuccotti Park and more than 1,000 cities have put the nation on a path to renewal.

While it’s hard to think in absolute terms about something so new, something without central leadership or a written platform, the need to reverse obvious flaws has touched a chord.

Perhaps, as Sachs says, a new generation of leaders who are not on the corporate take is just getting started. Perhaps it is history in the making and the dawn of a new progressive era. Perhaps it needs to be the crowd-sourcing movement it is and not a party or corporation or organization that’s easily corrupted and dominated by the wealthiest few. Perhaps the pendulum—as pendulums do—is swinging back.

Yeah, that’s a lot of perhaps – but one thing is certain – the OWS idea. A tent can be taken down and people can be dispersed with pepper spray. Not an idea.

Once upon a time collaboration was not all that radical a concept, in the business world and even in Congress.

Lately collaboration has become a buzzword, something that businesses and their PR departments are quick to pay lip service to; maybe they even aspire to collaborate with their partners; maybe they really believe they are collaborative. (Shall we take Congress and the notion of bipartisanship and collaboration out of this discussion entirely? Let’s do.)

Talking the collaborative talk is one thing; true collaboration these days is the exception.

Trewin Restorick, chief executive of the UK environmental advisory body Global Action Plan, added the idea of “collaborative consumption” to the mix in a thoughtful Trewin’s Blog post. His blog post begins:

“One of the fundamental challenges constantly facing the environmental movement is the disconnection between the scale of the problem and the solutions proposed. Are we really surprised at public apathy when on the one hand we talk about climate change as the biggest challenge facing humanity whilst on the other we recommend unplugging mobile phone chargers? Clearly more fundamental change is required if we are to get anywhere near an 80 per cent cut in carbon emissions by 2050.” Read the rest of this entry »

This is the time of year when writers, journalists, bloggers or whatever we scribblers have become in an age where communication and connection occurs mostly in 140-word snippets or less take a look back and ahead. Top Ten lists abound; crystal ball thumb-sucking dots the landscape and cyberspace.

I’ll leave that listing and prediction stuff (mostly) to the experts, or at least to those who have managed to stay gainfully and reliably employed over the last 12 months. They must have greater insight, or skills or something.

I do have some observations, for what they are worth:

- The usual word to describe the recovery is fragile but I prefer chimerical. Corporate profits are rebounding, Wall Street’s escape act was hugely successful and Republicans proved once again that America’s short-term memory disorder is firmly entrenched and that lies, inaccuracies, misrepresentations, denials, polarization and fear-mongering is a winning strategy. Well, winning for them – for many the economic recovery is mostly non-existent: unemployment hovers stubbornly around 10 percent; wages continue their decline; the housing market remains in the toilet; energy costs are increasing; the stranglehold of Big Oil and Big Coal continues unabated.

- Whatever the emerging ‘new normal’ is, it’s not much fun – it’s really pretty raw, stressful and uncertain.

- On a personal note: Freelancing should never be construed as working for free! OK? Are we clear?

- Environmentally-speaking, when electric vehicles hit the market in a major and consumer-friendly way—and one, the Chevy Volt, wins Motor Trend’s Car of the Year Award—that is stunning and hopeful progress.

- Environmentally-speaking, when a disaster like the Deepwater Horizon occurs and little to nothing occurs to change our dependence on fossil fuel, or regulation of Big Oil, that is stunning and disturbing progress of an entirely different sort.

So ‘here’s to the new boss, same as the old boss.’

Here’s to the New Year, same as the Old Year.

The “eco-industrial district” concept in Seattle is moving, slowly, but moving from concept to sustainable reality.

The Metropolitan King County Council recently adopted a proposal that calls for a partnership with the City of Seattle to create Eco-Industrial Districts in the city and throughout the county.

If this merger of green and industrial development manages to take off in a real way, it will assist in the cleanup and development in some of Seattle’s grittiest industrial core areas, such as the SoDo district or in the Duwamish River corridor in south Seattle by coordinating various public sector initiatives on sustainable communities.

Read the rest of this entry »

A good way for a bank to make people forget its role in the sub-prime financial fiasco that’s rocked the economy is to focus on its climate change and sustainability efforts and that’s what Bank of America Merrill Lynch is doing.

BoA’s “Environmental Progress Report” this month revealed the good things it is up to on the corporate sustainability front, and to give the bank some credit (even if its not giving you any), there are some good things to report.

It’s ahead of the schedule it set in 2007 when it unveiled a 10-year, $20 billion “business initiative” focused on addressing climate change. Through June of this year BoA says it “directed” $8.4 billion through lending, investing, capital markets activity, philanthropy and its own operations. The bank committed about $5.4 billion of that in lending and investing activities while facilitating nearly $3 billion in capital markets activity.

Read the rest of this entry »

The clean-tech sector’s three major bellwethers – biofuels, wind and solar – are poised to fuel huge growth  in clean energy revenue, jobs and capital investment over the next decade, according to a new report from Clean Edge Inc.

“Clean Energy Trends 2010” projects that those benchmark technologies, which totaled $124.8 billion in 2008 and grew 15.8 percent to $144.5 billion in 2009, to grow to $343.4 billion in 2019. That’s growth of almost 138 percent.

Read the rest of this entry »

Gross domestic product (GDP) has been the standard, go-to measure of a country’s economic health for decades. But that approach is under pressure according to a recent New York Times magazine piece.

The long article last month by Jon Gertner, “The Rise and Fall of the G.D.P.,” notes that while “academics and gadflies” for some time have been critical of GDP as an inaccurate and misleading global gauge of prosperity, the general attitude towards it recently has been challenged by world leaders and by international groups such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). OECD is the Paris-based group of 31 member countries that are “committed to democracy and the market economy from around the world to: support sustainable economic growth, boost employment, raise living standards, maintain financial stability, assist other countries’ economic development, contribute to growth in world trade.”

GDP is an index that tracks a country’s entire economic output. It’s a handy and somewhat useful snapshot that’s heavily stressed and scrutinized by economists and stat freaks. But there is an increasing realization that it shortchanges human elements and societal factors in calculating or understanding sustainable economic activity.

“The G.D.P., according to arguments I heard from economists as far afield as Italy, France and Canada,” writes Gertner, “has not only failed to capture the well-being of a 21st-century society but has also skewed global political objectives toward the single-minded pursuit of economic growth.”

There are many ifs and buts about GDP. For instance when Boeing sells hundreds of aircraft to airlines, foreign and domestic, that has a nice impact on the local economy where the planes are built here in my state of  Washington and on overall GDP, but it says virtually nothing about the economic condition of a retailer in Mississippi or unemployment in Missouri.

And what about staying home to raise children? GDP does not take that activity into account.

Other measures are needed and coming into play, Gertner says. The Canadian Index of Well-Being is debuting this year “as a counterweight to the monolithic gross domestic product numbers,” the Times magazine article states.

It could be that dozens or even hundreds of indices and indicators are needed to track economic growth and prosperity in a meaningful and more human way. The article cites a non-profit organization in Washington D.C., State of the USA, which could become a national clearinghouse for a ‘key national indicators system,’ something that the recently enacted health care bill calls on Congress to help finance.

“Think of it as a report card meant to show a country’s citizens the exact areas — in health, education, the environment and so forth — where improvement is called for; such indicators would also record how we improve, or fail to improve, over time. The State of the USA intends to ultimately post around 300 indicators on issues like crime, energy, infrastructure, housing, health, education, environment and the economy,” says Gertner.

A major problem with GDP as the main go-to measure is that it doesn’t place economic value or account for work done in the home, such as housework or child care or preparing dinner at home. And the economic activity measured by GDP is too-often mistakenly interpreted as citizens’ well-being.

Monthly tracking of GDP won’t go away however; indexing human happiness and well-being seems a tad too airy and out there, but it would help if other economic, societal and environmental indicators gained similar attention and stature.

Many economists acknowledge that unemployment claims, consumer spending, retail sales and inventories tell us more how the economy is really doing. For instance the Purchasing Managers Index, maintained by the Institute for Supply Management, is cited as excellent indicator of manufacturing strength that is better than GDP. The PMI index is based on five major indicators: new orders, inventory levels, production, supplier deliveries and the employment environment.