Wednesday, January 31, 2007

"GO GREEN, GET RICH" from CNN/Money


Business 2.0 Magazine just ran a cover article on their website called "Go Green, Get Rich" which underscores the sea change in attitudes about environmental responsibility and business. The mainstream media has apparently made the switch from the rediculous assersion "jobs vs environment" to "green business can get rich" - I love it.

The article covers the nine major woes and solutions coming out of business. I don't believe that technologies and business alone will get us out of the mess we're in. Fundamentally, we have to completely reorient the way we relate to eachother as co-inhabitants on planet earth.... Even so, the article is very encouraging!
Here is the article. go to the main website to drill down to each of the 9 areas.

"Go green. Get rich.
Think humanity's problems are too big to be tackled by business? Think again. Here are nine companies showing how we can make millions saving us from ourselves.
Business 2.0 Magazine
By Chris Taylor, Business 2.0 Magazine senior editor
January 26 2007: 2:41 PM EST

SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0 Magazine) -- If you've read the news lately, you know the scale of the problem. Catastrophes that once seemed far away are creeping uncomfortably close to our lifetimes. The permanent polar ice cap will disappear by 2040. The seas could be practically devoid of fish by 2048. Manhattan and Miami will be flooded by 2050. Add in widespread disease and famine, and you have a script for the apocalypse.

But before you get too depressed, consider that business - until now part of the problem - is scrambling for answers. Clean-technology investments soared by more than 50 percent in the first three quarters of 2006. And venture capital giant Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has announced a doubling of its renewable-energy fund to $200 million. Kleiner partner Ray Lane told the Wall Street Journal that clean tech will be "bigger than the Internet, by an order of magnitude."

For the following stories, we identified the most intractable problems facing the human race. Beyond climate change, there are the pollution troubles: mountains of trash, haze-choked skies, and dirty water. Disease includes not just viral epidemics but also new strains of ultraresistant bacteria. And our global food problem isn't just about Third World famine; it's also about conditions that could wipe out the $158 billion fishing industry.

It made for a disquieting list - until we found companies developing workable, scalable solutions. For each, we teased out not just the size of the potential windfall but also entrepreneurial insights from the pioneers. Finally, we offer a look at technologies too new to be commercialized but that could emerge in just a few years. Our most disastrous century yet? Maybe. It could also be our finest hour.

The biggest problems

1. Global warming

2. Oil dependency

3. Hunger and malnutrition

4. Dirty air

5. Dirty water

6. Over fishing

7. Epidemics

8. Drug-resistant infections

9. Waste disposal

From the February 1, 2007 issue"

Friday, January 26, 2007

CEOs Urge Bush to Limit Greenhouse Gas Emissions

CEOs Urge Bush to Limit Greenhouse Gas Emissions

By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 23, 2007; A06

On the eve of the State of the Union address, the chief executives of 10 major corporations urged President Bush to embrace mandatory ceilings on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in order to stem climate change.

But yesterday White House spokesman Tony Snow said that binding caps on carbon dioxide emissions would not be part of the president's proposals tonight. And a member of the corporate delegation said that last week the White House canceled a meeting with the executives that had been scheduled for yesterday morning.

"The President has always believed, when it comes to climate change, that the best way to achieve reductions is through innovation," Snow said, "and to figure out ways to come up with energy sources that are going to meet our economy's constant demand for energy, and at the same time, do it in a way that's going to be friendly for the environment."

There has been widespread speculation about what Bush might say about climate change tonight. Several legislative proposals have emerged in Congress with different ways for addressing climate change.

Major corporate leaders have been changing their position on climate change for the past year or two, and many of them are convinced that some form of regulation of or tax on carbon emissions is inevitable. With many states talking about coming up with their own laws, corporate leaders have started to urge the federal government to establish a nationwide standard.

"We can and must take prompt action to establish a coordinated, economy-wide market-driven approach to climate protection," the executives said in a letter to Bush. In an interview later, Jeffry E. Sterba, chairman of PNM Resources, a New Mexico utility, said that it was better to act now than to be forced to act in a "precipitous way" later.

The executives support a system that would create a cap on emissions, give allocations to companies based on past emissions and allow firms to trade allocations to meet gradually declining emission targets. The system, similar to one being used in Europe, would have far-reaching implications for utility rates, power plant construction, energy efficiency and American automobiles.

The executives' plan would slow the growth in greenhouse gases over the next five years, then reverse that growth and cut annual emissions by 70 percent to 90 percent of today's levels in 15 years.

Jeffrey Immelt, chairman of General Electric, pointing to initiatives in California and a group of Northeastern states, said "this is happening already." In addition to Immelt and Sterba, the group included the chief executives of Lehman Brothers Holdings, PG&E, Alcoa, Caterpillar, BP America, Duke Energy, DuPont and FPL Group.

Snow said that he thought Bush's proposals "address in a comprehensive and realistic way concerns about greenhouse emissions, and also their primary sources."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/22/AR2007012201237.html

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Corporations like sex and chocolate, too?

Corporations are learning that it's better to collaborate, as described in this recent www.socialfunds.com article "From Competition to Cooperation: Companies Collaborate on Social and Environmental Issues."

What you see is evidence of collaboration going on in the corporate sector led by groups such as: Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), United States Climate Action Partnership, Global Social Compliance Programme (GSCP), Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG)...

Is it all green washing? Or are there real actions being taken to get us out of the mess we have created on the planet....we'll see.

Sex and Chocolate? What does that have to do with all of this? read my earlier blog entry.

Responsible Competitiveness?

I just read this all on the FSG Advisors Website:

Harvard Business Review article "Strategy & Society: The Link Between Competitive Advantage and Corporate Social Responsibility" has won McKinsey Award for the Best Harvard Business Review Article in 2006. These awards, judged by an independent panel of leaders in the business community, recognize outstanding works that are likely to have a major influence on the actions of business managers worldwide.

Professor Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer, Co-founders of FSG Social Impact Advisors, introduce a new approach to corporate social responsibility in Harvard Business Review's December 2006 "Strategy and Society: The Link between Competitive Advantage and Corporate Social Responsibility."

Moving past generic CSR principles, Porter & Kramer see societal influence as the new frontier of competitive advantage. By integrating social dimensions into the core strategy frameworks that guide business decisions, companies can build on the interdependence between business and society, rather than being held back by the friction between them. The result is a new set of frameworks that enable companies to identify and address the specific social issues that matter most to their long-term success.

Free download of the Harvard Business Review article »

Friday, January 19, 2007

What makes you feel as good as sex or chocolate?


I have been doing alot of thinking about the power of co-creating, collaborations, community economics, mimicing "the web of life" in organizational development, etc. as key factors in helping get our civilization out of the mess we have created for ourselves.

I read in the latest issue of What is Enlightenment? Mag that collaborative behavior is the hallmark of evolution in our society.

David Korten
wrote "Using magnetic resonance imaging to take portraits of brain activity, scientists have found that during laboratory excercises that the experience of forming a cooperative alliance with another person produces a storng positive response in the pleasure center of the brain - rather like eating chocolate or engaging in good sex."

A New York Times Article describes the experiments in greater detail.

Thursday, January 18, 2007

It's not hard to change the world, just spend our money differently!

NY Times writer David Leonhart, makes a very good point in his latest article:

I post the entire article here...

"What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy

The human mind isn’t very well equipped to make sense of a figure like $1.2 trillion. We don’t deal with a trillion of anything in our daily lives, and so when we come across such a big number, it is hard to distinguish it from any other big number. Millions, billions, a trillion — they all start to sound the same.

The way to come to grips with $1.2 trillion is to forget about the number itself and think instead about what you could buy with the money. When you do that, a trillion stops sounding anything like millions or billions.

For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign — a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.

Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn’t use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds.

The final big chunk of the money could go to national security. The recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that have not been put in place — better baggage and cargo screening, stronger measures against nuclear proliferation — could be enacted. Financing for the war in Afghanistan could be increased to beat back the Taliban’s recent gains, and a peacekeeping force could put a stop to the genocide in Darfur.

All that would be one way to spend $1.2 trillion. Here would be another:

The war in Iraq. In the days before the war almost five years ago, the Pentagon estimated that it would cost about $50 billion. Democratic staff members in Congress largely agreed. Lawrence Lindsey, a White House economic adviser, was a bit more realistic, predicting that the cost could go as high as $200 billion, but President Bush fired him in part for saying so.

These estimates probably would have turned out to be too optimistic even if the war had gone well. Throughout history, people have typically underestimated the cost of war, as William Nordhaus, a Yale economist, has pointed out.

But the deteriorating situation in Iraq has caused the initial predictions to be off the mark by a scale that is difficult to fathom. The operation itself — the helicopters, the tanks, the fuel needed to run them, the combat pay for enlisted troops, the salaries of reservists and contractors, the rebuilding of Iraq — is costing more than $300 million a day, estimates Scott Wallsten, an economist in Washington.

That translates into a couple of billion dollars a week and, over the full course of the war, an eventual total of $700 billion in direct spending.

The two best-known analyses of the war’s costs agree on this figure, but they diverge from there. Linda Bilmes, at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and former Clinton administration adviser, put a total price tag of more than $2 trillion on the war. They include a number of indirect costs, like the economic stimulus that the war funds would have provided if they had been spent in this country.

Mr. Wallsten, who worked with Katrina Kosec, another economist, argues for a figure closer to $1 trillion in today’s dollars. My own estimate falls on the conservative side, largely because it focuses on the actual money that Americans would have been able to spend in the absence of a war. I didn’t even attempt to put a monetary value on the more than 3,000 American deaths in the war.

Besides the direct military spending, I’m including the gas tax that the war has effectively imposed on American families (to the benefit of oil-producing countries like Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia). At the start of 2003, a barrel of oil was selling for $30. Since then, the average price has been about $50. Attributing even $5 of this difference to the conflict adds another $150 billion to the war’s price tag, Ms. Bilmes and Mr. Stiglitz say.

The war has also guaranteed some big future expenses. Replacing the hardware used in Iraq and otherwise getting the United States military back into its prewar fighting shape could cost $100 billion. And if this war’s veterans receive disability payments and medical care at the same rate as veterans of the first gulf war, their health costs will add up to $250 billion. If the disability rate matches Vietnam’s, the number climbs higher. Either way, Ms. Bilmes says, “It’s like a miniature Medicare.”

In economic terms, you can think of these medical costs as the difference between how productive the soldiers would have been as, say, computer programmers or firefighters and how productive they will be as wounded veterans. In human terms, you can think of soldiers like Jason Poole, a young corporal profiled in The New York Times last year. Before the war, he had planned to be a teacher. After being hit by a roadside bomb in 2004, he spent hundreds of hours learning to walk and talk again, and he now splits his time between a community college and a hospital in Northern California.

Whatever number you use for the war’s total cost, it will tower over costs that normally seem prohibitive. Right now, including everything, the war is costing about $200 billion a year.

Treating heart disease and diabetes, by contrast, would probably cost about $50 billion a year. The remaining 9/11 Commission recommendations — held up in Congress partly because of their cost — might cost somewhat less. Universal preschool would be $35 billion. In Afghanistan, $10 billion could make a real difference. At the National Cancer Institute, annual budget is about $6 billion.

“This war has skewed our thinking about resources,” said Mr. Wallsten, a senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a conservative-leaning research group. “In the context of the war, $20 billion is nothing.”

As it happens, $20 billion is not a bad ballpark estimate for the added cost of Mr. Bush’s planned surge in troops. By itself, of course, that price tag doesn’t mean the surge is a bad idea. If it offers the best chance to stabilize Iraq, then it may well be the right option.

But the standard shouldn’t simply be whether a surge is better than the most popular alternative — a far-less-expensive political strategy that includes getting tough with the Iraqi government. The standard should be whether the surge would be better than the political strategy plus whatever else might be accomplished with the $20 billion.

This time, it would be nice to have that discussion before the troops reach Iraq.

leonhardt@nytimes.com"

Saturday, January 13, 2007

The Wealth of growing your own food!

This video demonstrates a means for families to grow food in their own homes!