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By Beth Trask

How can you shift a corporate culture so that it embodies environmental sustainability?  That was just one of the big questions explored at the recent Green Innovation in Business Solutions Lab in New York City.

At these "open space" conferences, participants self-organize into working groups charged with finding solutions to specific challenges.  I spent much of the day with 15 or so others equally passionate about building sustainability into organizational cultures.

Is it all about getting the incentives right, we wondered?  Look at companies like Intel and Unilever that have added sustainability goals to their employee bonus programs.  Or perhaps sustainability is brought in through recruiting practices that attract fresh green-minded talent?

Should sustainability be as much a social norm as safety is for many companies?  Think about manufacturing facilities where employees are so trained in EH&S protocols that they remind each other to put on their safety goggles.  But that approach might be too authoritative for companies that want their employees to feel empowered to innovate.

Is sustainability driven by front-line employees who want to feel good about where they work?  Does it need to be led by the executives or embraced by middle-management?

Ultimately, we landed upon a simple equation for a sustainability culture:

Start with a company-wide BHAG – you know, the "Big Hairy Audacious Goal."   It must come from the top (after some coaxing from sustainability champions at lower levels), and be sufficiently ambitious and inspirational—so much so that it's likely no one will know exactly how they are going to get there.  Recall WalMart's mandate to create zero waste; Unilever's vision to double the size of the business while reducing overall environmental impact; or Cisco System's 25% absolute carbon reduction goal.

Divide this BHAG by a set of programs that suit a given company—polices, competitions, incentives or training programs, combined with a data gathering and reporting mechanism.

Add in a critical variable:  Passionate internal advocates who keep the drumbeat going.

Hit the "equal" sign and voila! You have solved for a sustainability-focused corporate culture.

Or have you?  Let us know what your equation looks like.

Although the oil spill in the Gulf continues to worsen, there’s a bit of good news for Gulf fishermen and fishing-related businesses. The Senate last night approved an amendment by Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) that would devote $26 million to support fishermen and to improve fisheries science because of the spill. The House still has to vote on the measure, so more critical funding could be added before its finalized and sent to the President.

This was originally posted on the Huffington Post. Opponents of climate legislation often claim that now is the wrong time to put a price on carbon, with the economy just emerging from a recession.  But a must-read study released today by the well-respected, nonpartisan Peterson Institute for International Economics shows that the reverse is actually […]

Should Congress or the EPA act to address the threat of global warming?  Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that Congress must act – and she’s right.  The House passed legislation last year, and recently Senators Kerry and Lieberman introduced a very different approach called the American Power Act. But both bills would cut carbon pollution, curb […]

By Gernot Wagner

Edward L. Glaeser makes the case for simplicity in addressing climate change. I couldn’t agree more with his premise. The basic economics are indeed simple. Climate change might be the largest market failure the world has ever seen. To correct it, put the right incentives in place: correct the fact that we currently treat the atmosphere as a free sewer for our global warming pollution. Problem solved.

The how and especially the politics are not quite as straight-forward. Glaeser bemoans that the proposed American Power Act has 987 pages and identifies three culprits: that the Act tries to do more than just put a price on carbon, that it uses a cap-and-trade system rather than a tax, and that the problem has an important international dimension. He is broadly right on one and three but not on two: the issue of a cap versus a tax.

A firm limit on global warming pollution does not make the law more complicated. It makes it better.

First, a cap sets a firm upper limit on pollution. Glaeser acknowledges as much by saying that “fixing the number of permits may actually be the right thing to do.” It is.

Second, it’s politics, stupid. There is a good reason why the U.S. tax code has 17,000 pages. Proposing a tax on paper is simple. Getting it through the political process is a different matter altogether. Most significantly, every tax credit, every exemption means an increase in pollution. That’s not the case with a cap. While politics does what politics does best—worry about the allocation of allowances—the upper pollution limit stands.

Third, and contrary to what is sometimes argued by tax advocates, a cap creates a more stable policy environment. Certainty is the sine qua non for energy policy.  While it is true that a cap and trade program can introduce short-term variability into the carbon price, that is unlikely to matter for investments in energy infrastructure.  What matters is certainty over the long run. Capital-intensive investment decisions take years if not decades to pay for themselves (think about a new electric power station).

A well designed cap—especially one with a price floor, which this Act would include—creates this kind of certainty, by guaranteeing that emissions must go down and, therefore, that emissions reductions will have value. A tax is easily revoked, altered, or put "on holiday." A cap has durability. And even if it does have to be amended, market foresight will allow smooth transitions, much more so than a tax would.

Fourth is the international dimension, Glaeser’s last point. A cap makes international coordination easier. It also creates incentives for developing countries to cap their own emissions, in order to gain from selling allowances into a U.S. market and create win-win-win situations for themselves, U.S. companies and consumers, and the atmosphere.

All four of these reasons also appear in America’s Climate Choices, a terrific new study just released by the National Academy of Sciences. It provides the scientific closing argument for the debate unfolding in the Senate. The science is compelling, the urgency to act is clear, and the main solution is equally apparent: put a price on global warming pollution, ideally through a firm, declining cap on emissions.

In his insightful post, Rob Stavins makes two key points regarding the allocation of emission allowances under climate legislation like that introduced last week by Senators Kerry and Lieberman. First, Stavins addresses head-on the concerns that some progressives have toward the allocation provisions in the bill, asking in the title of his post: “Is the […]

Featuring: Fred Krupp, President Steve Cochran, Director, National Climate Campaign Will the oil disaster in the Gulf help or hinder the passage of an historic climate and energy bill? What are the prospects for winning bipartisan support? What can we expect to hear from the bill’s opponents? Listen to this discussion: Download mp3 | Subscribe […]

Featuring: Fred Krupp, President Steve Cochran, Director, National Climate Campaign Will the oil disaster in the Gulf help or hinder the passage of an historic climate and energy bill? What are the prospects for winning bipartisan support? What can we expect to hear from the bill’s opponents? Listen to this discussion: Download mp3 | Subscribe […]

By Elizabeth Sturcken

This week, Walmart released its third sustainability report.  Since Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and our team in Bentonville, Arkansas, works daily with Walmart, we want to share our thoughts on the environmental portion of the report.  Because we don’t take money from Walmart – or any of our corporate partners – we can be candid about what’s working and what’s not.

This is our fifth year working with Walmart, and throughout that time we’ve been pushing the company hard to take aggressive goals and to be transparent about its results – clearly disclosing progress and the data to back it up. With this report, it is evident that the message is starting to sink in.

The report gives a complete accounting of all of the sustainability goals to which Walmart has committed, with a detailed progress update for each.  The sheer number and scope of the goals is notable, as is the actual progress that the company has made on most of them.  To be honest, I find it even more impressive that Walmart is also candid about where they are falling short of a goal.  Most companies I know don’t want to talk about what’s not working.  But taking risks and setting high goals is what we need more of – it’s the only way to achieve transformational environmental change.  And in the context of progress on many other fronts, a struggle here or there seems just about right.

One great move forward since last year is Walmart’s new climate goal to reduce 20 million metric tons of carbon pollution from its products’ lifecycle and supply chain over the next five years.  This fills the biggest hole in the scope of the sustainability program.

But there are some areas in the report, and in Walmart’s program, that still need improvement:

• Avoiding waste. Walmart likes to talk about waste being redirected from landfills, but it should also focus on avoiding waste in the first place and reporting on that.  Now that a good tracking system for waste is in place, we’d like to see a report of the total volume of waste produced annually, and the change in total volume from 2008 to 2009. We’d like to know whether Walmart’s waste reduction and diversion efforts are actually resulting in a net reduction from one year to the next.
• Progress on packaging is lagging.  The report gives data on the number of items represented in a packaging scorecard.  That would have been fine a couple of years ago, but we should be able to see an actual baseline by now.  It also mentions the goal of “packaging neutral,” which is never defined.  For these goals to be meaningful, Walmart needs to define the metrics by which it will measure progress.  While we’ve heard many anecdotes about packaging reductions at Walmart, for now we have no way of knowing if net progress is actually being made.
• Reporting progress in context. The report on phosphates (an excellent attempt, by the way, to improve water quality in the Americas) gives progress on only a small portion of the goal and lacks a baseline (defined in last year’s report as the total mass of phosphates sold in 2009). As such, it is really meaningless.  Knowing that 29% of detergent is phosphate free in Central America sounds good, but it is a relatively tiny percentage of the entire Americas, and who knows whether that represents a change driven by Walmart.

From what we see on the ground, Walmart is indeed working hard to “broaden and accelerate” their sustainability efforts, as CEO Mike Duke says.  The folks working on this at Walmart have taken to proudly wearing buttons emblazoned with a “37” representing the number of Walmart sustainability goals (though there are actually 38 with the new climate goal added in).  It’s a symbol of how intently they are focused on moving forward to meet those goals.

As we all know, California’s salmon runs and the fishing industry that depends on them have been hit hard the past few years. A number of factors have contributed to the significant decline of this iconic fish and as a result we are facing the third straight year of a limited, and at times, closed […]

By Scott Anderson

By Tim O’Connor, Attorney / Climate Policy Analyst

A recent issue of the UK Guardian has brought to the forefront the findings of paper published in the Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering.[1] This paper, purporting to call into question the ability of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology to serve as a solution for greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) is making waves in the scientific and climate change policy communities. Titled “Sequestering carbon dioxide in a closed underground volume,” the article suggests CCS is not a viable solution to the current problem of these emissions from fossil fuel power plants, an assertion flying in the face of accepted wisdom on the subject to date.[2]

Published by perhaps the only Texas-based husband and wife team specializing in petroleum and chemical engineering, Christine Ehlig-Economides and Michael Economides, the journal article has resulted in a significant amount of consternation[3] in the scientific community and an unfortunate level of attention by news outlets looking for a reason (scientifically supportable or otherwise) to undermine CCS as a bridge technology for greenhouse gas mitigation.[4]

In essence, the paper argues that CCS will require a much larger subsurface geographic area than previously thought to be effective.  According to the article, a single 500-MW power plant could require a land area about the size of a small U.S. state.  Due to this projected massive land need, the authors argue that CCS will be cost-prohibitive, essentially a boondoggle of the highest proportions in almost every foreseeable application.  Such an opinion is certainly not a sound bite the U.S. Department of Energy (which recently announced a $3 billion investment in CCS research, development and deployment) or power plants such as the proposed Tenaska Trailblazer site (projected to sequester 85% of its emissions using CCS) are likely to take seriously.[5]

This article has been met with an outpouring of support for CCS from a supermajority of experts making up the broader scientific community on this subject.  Indeed, a read of the responses to the journal, coupled with a review of the litany of CCS literature, show that the authors' opinions on CCS potential are extreme outliers in the growing scientific consensus surrounding carbon sequestration.

In response to journal article and Guardian story, no fewer than four formal responses by leading CCS experts in the scientific community have been added to the public discussion, with more likely to be published.[6]

In addition, the World Resources Institute (WRI) and American Petroleum Institute (API) issued statements in response to the article, pointing out the authors’ misapplication of known petrochemical and reservoir management principles combined with improper assumptions. Of note is that no responses from the scientific community have supported the authors’ extreme projections on subsurface area needs, or their conclusions regarding limitations on pore space "injectivity" that are known to be posed by pressure considerations or other factors.

In general, scientific community responses to the article include five fundamental critiques of the authors’ methodology:

1. A mischaracterization of reservoir outcropping leakage potential
2. A misunderstanding of pore space dynamics and availability
3. Fundamental errors in authors’ numerical model related to vertical and lateral migration potential (questioning the absolute impermeable boundaries assumption)
4. Failure to take evidence from current CCS projects into account
5. Inaccurate perception of reservoir pressure management at CCS sites

A sixth critique by the API questions the authors' estimates (or underestimates) of the amount of enhanced oil recovery available for CO2 sequestration, a critical part of their assertion that the U.S. doesn’t have enough capacity to mitigate emissions on the level necessary to meet long-term reduction targets.

Such critiques, however, while tending to disprove the authors' overall characterization of how much CO2 can be injected into an individual site, and how it will migrate, must make room for the valuable messages that can be drawn from their work.

First and foremost, the authors and response papers agree that, as an important first step to any project, it is necessary to confirm the aquifer size and characterize subsurface geologic conditions through an aquifer appraisal process before starting sequestration. This process of site selection will be the only way to know the subsurface characteristics of the injection site, model the probable plume migration pathways and make projections about storage potential.

Second, and perhaps as important, is that the authors and responders agree that reservoir pressure is linked to overall injectivity, and that detailed formation-scale capacity assessments should take pore volume and pressure into account.

Finally, since injected CO2 plumes can migrate laterally or vertically underground depending on geologic and injection conditions, it is critical that sequestration projects be equipped with sufficient subsurface monitoring to track CO2 migration once injection begins.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, when properly sited, operated and monitored, geologic sequestration projects can be expected to retain 99% of injected CO2 in the subsurface for 1000 years or more.

This finding underscores the importance of CCS as a low-carbon technology and shows the importance of educating the public about the merits of the technology.  With the fresh gut check provided by the Economides and the overwhelming response from both the scientific community, API and WRI, the desire to make CCS work as a mitigation option is receiving the attention is deserves.

The completion of a few successful commercial scale projects at home and abroad should quell concerns such as those raised in the article and allow CCS technology to grow as a major solution for reducing emissions and provide another reason to invest in innovative technologies that can help us transition to a clean energy economy.

[1] Guardian, April 27, 2010, “US research paper questions viability of carbon capture and storage”

[2] Ehlig-Economides and Economides, Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering 70 (2010) 123–130

[3] Haszeldine et al., Response to the article April 27, 2010 article in the Guardian

[4] Canada Free Press, Feb., 25, 2010, “Geologic Carbon Storage Can Never Work, says new US study”

[5] The Clean Economy Group, April 19, 2010, “Tenaska agrees to capture, sequester 85% of CO2 emissions in settlement with Environmental Defense Fund”

[6] 1) Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, 2) Pacific Northwest National Lab, 3) ZEP (Zero Emissions Platform), 4) Formal Reply by A. J. Cavanagh, R. S. Haszeldine and M. J. Blunt

Leading-edge businesses such as IBM, GE, KKR, Walmart and many others are tackling environmental sustainability head on. They are finding profit and spurring innovation by looking through the “green lens” of environmental sustainability. Both business and the environment need more of this thinking from more people in more organizations in more sectors. The Solutions Labs 2010 are to […]

A hearing today in the House Committee on Natural Resources, Subcommittee on Insular Affairs, Oceans and Wildlife mostly overlooked evidence of the benefits of catch shares and instead zeroed in on fears. Out of the eight witnesses who testified, just one was a fisherman, Bob Dooley, who has actually fished in a catch share program ...

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By Gernot Wagner

A Practical Guide To A Prosperous, Low Carbon Europe is the latest McKinsey study to show how it is eminently affordable to achieve the transition to a low-carbon world. The headline on a post by Financial Times climate über-scribe Fiona Harvey puts it best: “Europe’s energy in 2050: Cutting CO2 by 80% no more expensive than business as usual.”

How is that possible?

Initial capital expenditures are higher for renewable energy but operational cost savings along the way make up the difference. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

To be sure, there are some very clear obstacles. The old economists’ mantra applies here as well: if it’s so cheap, why aren’t we doing it already? Well, we ought to be. The obstacles are largely political, driven by vested interests. If you are just now building a new coal plant and haven’t put much thought into carbon capture and storage technology, you may be less inclined to cheer than your neighbor investing in wind and solar.

McKinsey isn’t saying that everyone wins in this new world. The ones who see the future and act accordingly do. Most importantly, society and the planet win as well.

EDF recently submitted comments to NOAA on its draft catch share policy. In the letter we address how catch shares are better than fishery closures; how they improve fishing jobs and restore the resource; and how they are locally designed to meet specific biological, economic and social goals. We also address the importance of stakeholder input in the design of a catch share program.

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Given that the State Water Resources Control Board’s flow proceeding finished yesterday, it is worth highlighting yet another reason why this work is so necessary and timely. As a reminder, the SWRCB is charged with determining the volume and timing of flows in the Bay-Delta necessary to support a healthy ecosystem, including protecting imperiled fisheries. This […]

Cynthia Koehler is Senior Attorney and California Water Legislative Director for EDF. Ann Hayden is a Senior Water Resource Analyst at EDF. If nothing else, Tuesday’s joint oversight hearing before the Assembly Water Parks and Wildlife and the Senate Resources and Water Committees made clear that while the Delta package was enacted last year, the […]

Southeast fishermen recently finished the first month of closures on many popular fish. Many fisheries won’t open again for several months and reality is sinking in across the region. The New York Times is even taking notice. When a region’s fishery woes make ink in one of the most prominent papers in the nation, you know […]

EDF is known for unconventional tactics. We often experiment with new ideas to find the ways that work. However, this time I had a chance to do something truly off-the-wall. I was asked to make a video with the coalition Clean Energy Works that explains cap and trade in a way that non-economists could understand, […]

Today, EDF announced the first 20 companies that have signed on to our Climate Corps program for summer 2010.  It’s amazing how far this program has come since we launched it two years ago. We piloted the program in 2008 with just seven MBA students placed in Bay Area companies. Those students didn’t know what […]