climate

Canada Becoming Home For Record Fracking

by Joanna Zelman on December 29, 2011

Huffington Post…

by Nicholas Kusnetz, ProPublica Early last year, deep in the forests of northern British Columbia, workers for Apache Corp. performed what the company proclaimed was the biggest hydraulic fracturing operation ever. The project used 259 million gallons of water and 50,000 tons of sand to frack 16 gas wells side by side. It was “nearly four times larger than any project of its nature in North America,” Apache boasted. The record didn’t stand for long. By the end of the year, Apache and its partner, Encana, topped it by half at a neighboring site. As furious debate over fracking continues in the United States, it is instructive to look at how a similar gas boom is unfolding for our neighbor to the north. To a large extent, the same themes have emerged as Canada struggles to balance the economic benefits drilling has brought with the reports of water contamination and air pollution that have accompanied them. The Canadian boom has differed in one regard: The western provinces’ exuberant embrace of large-scale fracking offers a vision of what could happen elsewhere if governments clear away at least some of the regulatory hurdles to growth. Even as some officials have questioned the wisdom of doing so, Alberta and British Columbia have dueled to draw investment by offering financial incentives and loosening rules. The result has been some of the most intensive drilling anywhere. “There definitely is concern on the part of people living in northeast B.C. on the scale of developments, which are quite significant already and are only in their infancy,”said Ben Parfitt, an analyst with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, a research institute that promotes environmental sustainability. “We are seeing some of the largest fracking operations anywhere on earth.” Canada’s eastern regions have proceeded more cautiously. In March, Quebec placed a moratorium on shale development pending further study. Protesters have taken to the streets in New Brunswick demanding the same. Public opposition, coupled with low gas prices, has slowed drilling over the past year. Still, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers expects production from shale and other unconventional sources to more than triple in the next decade. The industry’s aggressive plan for growth has drawn an ambivalent response from the nation’s top environmental officials. In March, Canada’s deputy minister of the environment sent an internal memo warning that more work was needed to assess the risks from shale gas drilling . The memo, obtained by an Ottawa-based newspaper and addressed to Environment Minister Peter Kent, said water use and contamination top a list of environmental concerns including air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and the use of unknown toxic chemicals. Kent subsequently ordered two studies looking at the safety and environmental impacts of shale drilling. Yet, in a written response to questions from ProPublica, the environment ministry affirmed its commitment to continued development. “Our Government believes shale gas is an important strategic resource that could provide numerous economic benefits to Canada,” the ministry’s statement said. Gas is an important part of a clean energy future, the ministry added, saying that “a healthy environment and a strong economy go hand in hand.” B.C., Alberta Lure Drillers Canada’s current drilling boom dates to the late 1990s, when Encana began using fracking to extract gas from dense rock in northern British Columbia. The second-largest gas driller in North America, Encana also started fracking shallow coal seams, or coalbed methane, in Alberta in the early 2000s, using nitrogen rather than water to free the gas. Coalbed methane drilling generally requires less fluid than fracking shale but occurs much closer to drinking water. In some cases, Encana and other companies have drilled wells directly into aquifers, injecting fracking fluids into groundwater suitable for drinking. In the middle of the last decade, Encana and other operators started exploring northern British Columbia’s shale gas reserves. The formations were promising, holding at least 200 trillion cubic feet of gas, according to industry estimates. But drillers faced formidable hurdles to get to it. Unlike the Barnett and Marcellus shales in the U.S., Canada’s best shale basins are far from most markets and existing infrastructure. Soggy ground slows drilling in the spring and summer, and the average high temperature hovers around zero degrees Fahrenheit in January. To encourage development, British Columbia enacted a series of incentives, including reduced royalties for deep drilling and credits for building roads and pipelines in the remote regions. These changes, combined with the area’s severe conditions, spurred companies to concentrate and scale up their operations in British Columbia in an effort to cut costs, industry experts say. The result: a string of record-breaking fracks. In a written response to questions from ProPublica, Apache said this approach reduces surface disturbance. It also can heighten the risk of air and water pollution, said Bruce Kramer, an expert in oil and gas law with McGinnis, Lochridge and Kilgore, a Texas-based law firm. In both western provinces, the regional authorities responsible for regulating drilling have passed rules to allow more intensive drilling. In Alberta, drillers can now pack wells closer together and pump more water out of shallow coal seams to free gas more efficiently. British Columbia issued detailed regulations last year that limit where and when companies can drill and set rigorous environmental standards but also gave its Oil and Gas Commission the authority to exempt drillers from virtually all of these provisions. The commission referred an inquiry from ProPublica to its parent organization, the Ministry of Energy and Mines. In written responses to questions, the Ministry said the new regulations adequately address environmental concerns over drilling activity in the province. Pointing to an upcoming health study and new rules that compel companies to disclose chemicals used in fracking, officials said they would continue to review and revise standards as necessary. Still, the regulatory shifts have prompted environmental advocates in Alberta and British Columbia to question whether officials are prepared to cope with rising concerns about water use, contamination and unchecked development. “We just don’t have a clue how big this issue is from a public policy perspective,”said Bob Simpson, a member of British Columbia’s legislative assembly and an outspoken critic. “We really don’t know what we’re doing.” Jessica Ernst’s Water Problems Over the last five years, there have been several prominent cases in which Alberta residents have said gas drilling contaminated their water. There are no hard numbers. The government does not track such complaints. But in some instances, residents’ frustration has been exacerbated by their sense that regulators have not properly investigated their claims. In 2005, Jessica Ernst noticed strange things happening to her water. The toilet fizzed. The faucets whistled. Black particles clogged her filter. Then she began getting rashes. Ernst, a longtime environmental consultant for oil and gas companies, wondered whether the changes could be connected to drilling nearby. Encana had been drilling shallow coalbed methane wells near her home outside of Rosebud, about 50 miles northeast of Calgary. She asked Alberta Environment and Water, the agency that oversees groundwater, to test her well. When the well was drilled in 1986, tests showed it had no methane . The new tests, however, showed high levels of the gas, as well as a hydrocarbon called F2 and two other chemicals. But in 2007, a government research agency concluded it was unlikely that drilling had affected her water . The final report said the chemicals found were not typically used in coalbed methane drilling, and that one had probably come from a plastic tube used to test the water. Ernst wasn’t satisfied with the province’s response, however. The government’s report concluded that the methane in her well might be occurring naturally because tests showed similar levels of gas in nearby wells. But the tests were conducted after Ernst noticed the changes in her water — she saw the results as an indication that the contamination might be more widespread. The government’s report also ignored evidence provided by one of its own analysts, a professor of geochemistry at the University of Alberta. When Karlis Muehlenbachs analyzed the gas in Ernst’s well for Alberta Environment and Water, he found ethane, a gas often found with methane, with a chemical signature indicating that it had come from deep underground, below the depth of the well. Muehlenbachs told ProPublica that the ethane’s signature meant that it could not have been there naturally. He said he is convinced that it resulted from drilling. As Ernst searched for answers to what happened to her water, she unearthed evidence of other problems related to drilling. She found an Alberta Environment and Water report that listed cases in which the fracking of shallow wells resulted in gas or fluid leaking into nearby gas wells or spraying into the air. She also found government gas well records that said Encana had fracked into the aquifer that supplies her water well. “The community was used as a test tube,”she said. “I was used as a test tube.” Earlier this year, Ernst sued Encana, Alberta Environment and Water and the Alberta Energy Resources Conservation Board , which regulates drilling, alleging that Encana’s drilling was negligent and that the government agencies had covered up the company’s contamination and failed to enforce regulations. Ernst, who is asking for about $33 million Canadian in damages and return of wrongful profits, has vowed she will not accept a settlement that includes a confidentiality agreement, as others have done. “Somebody has to do this,”she said. Alan Boras, a spokesman for Encana, said the company would not comment on the case. The Energy Resources Conservation Board denied a request for an interview. In written responses to questions, spokesman Bob Curran said he could not comment on the specifics of Ernst’s case, but the agency is confident it has conducted itself appropriately. Carrie Sancartier, a spokeswoman for Alberta Environment and Water, would not comment on Ernst’s allegations because of the lawsuit but said there have been no confirmed cases of gas drilling contaminating water wells in the province. Muehlenbachs, whose work has been used in several government investigations, said that is “simply false.” He said he’s analyzed thousands of cases of gas leaking up well bores and knows of at least a dozen cases of water contamination. Alberta has introduced several measures to safeguard water from shallow drilling. In 2006, it established a buffer zone between shallow gas wells and water wells and required drillers to test nearby water wells before drilling into an aquifer . Nevertheless, last January, as part of a review of drilling regulations, the Energy Resources Conservation Board said shallow fracking poses a risk to groundwater. Is ‘Communication’ a Risk? There have been no reports of groundwater contamination related to new drilling in British Columbia. Increasingly, however, there are reports of something called “communication” — events in which a fracture travels through the ground and connects two gas wells. Ken Paulson, chief engineer at the province’s Oil and Gas Commission, said these events do not pose a contamination risk. Other experts say their principal impact is to undermine production. But opponents of expanded shale drilling say instances of communication show that drillers lack a full understanding of what happens when wells are fracked closer together, increasing the risk of contamination. Anthony Ingraffea, an engineering professor at Cornell University, said that if a fracture hit a natural fault, it could allow contaminants to enter aquifers. Communication has occurred in the U.S. as well: Regulators in Texas, Oklahoma, Michigan and Pennsylvania reported such events to Canadian officials as part of the Energy Resources Conservation Board’s regulatory review . Documents provided to ProPublica show that energy companies have reported 25 cases of communication in British Columbia since 2009. Companies are not required to report such events, so the list isn’t comprehensive, Paulson said. In May 2010, the province’s Oil and Gas Commission issued a warning when a drilling company inadvertently shot sand from one fracking job into another well being drilled more than 2,000 feet away. The advisory said the operator contained the resulting jump in pressure within the well but warned of a “potential safety hazard.” When communication occurs, Paulson said, the biggest concern is that an operator could lose control of a well and cause a blowout. Concerns Over Water Consumption As the debate over communication continues, Parfitt and other Canadian environmentalists have raised more immediate concerns about water use. Fracking requires lots of water — on their biggest reported fracking job, Apache and Encana used an average of 28 million gallons of water per well. While the oil and gas industry says it is responsible for 1 percent or less of British Columbia’s overall water use, environmental advocates say that may not reflect the full extent of the industry’s consumption or long-term needs. Drillers use both surface and groundwater. Access to surface water is regulated by two agencies that issue long-term licenses or year-long permits. Overwhelmingly, energy companies have chosen to obtain permits, which require less regulatory review. Most groundwater withdrawals aren’t regulated at all. Drillers need permits to sink water wells, but there are no limits on the amount of water that can be taken from them. They can also purchase water from other well owners, so there’s no way to track overall use. “How much water is actually being used and, more importantly, how much water is projected to be used over next the 10 to 15 years? Because of the scattershot approach of regulation, this isn’t something we can actually answer right now,”said Matt Horne, acting director of the climate change program at the Pembina Institute, an environmental think tank that published a report on the gas industry’s water use. Last year, in a report focusing on province-wide groundwater oversight, British Columbia’s auditor general said the province was not adequately protecting aquifers from overuse and potential contamination. Agencies lacked the basic data necessary to assess the risks, such as the number and extent of the province’s aquifers, the report said. The Ministry of Energy and Mines, in a written response to questions, said the province is taking several steps to improve oversight of water use, including a research project studying aquifers. The agency said it can review large groundwater withdrawal projects and that pending changes to the province’s water law would regulate withdrawals. Drillers themselves are also moving to address water concerns. Encana and Apache have started using saline water not suitable for drinking or irrigation in some of their projects. Alan Boras, the Encana spokesman, said the company uses non-potable water almost exclusively in its main operating area in the Horn River Basin, where the largest frack jobs were reported. Environmentalists say they welcome the effort, but caution that these projects are tiny compared to the industry’s overall water use. Governments, Industry Get Cozy Public backlash to fracking has become such a concern for drillers and provincial governments in western Canada that last year they launched a joint effort to counter it. In December 2010, the governments of British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan signed a memorandum of understanding laying out a plan to share information and develop standards for hydraulic fracturing and water use. The provinces invited only one non-governmental entity to participate in the project: the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. The memo, which was leaked in August and published by the Alberta Federation of Labour, a union group, said the provinces and petroleum producers would work together to develop “key messages” on shale drilling to persuade the public not to fear fracking. “The project will help to demonstrate that shale gas extraction is viable, safe and environmentally sustainable,” the memo said. The memo blamed environmental groups for spreading misleading information and stirring opposition to drilling. “Environmental Non-Government organizations (ENGOs) are supporting a ill-informed [sic] campaign on hydraulic fracturing and water related issues in British Columbia and in other jurisdictions,” it said. “This is expected to grow as shale gas development expands into Alberta and Saskatchewan.” In a separate memo , Alberta Environment and Water reported that the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers had approached the province to work on a joint public relations campaign. Ultimately, no campaign materialized. Janet Annesley, a spokeswoman for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, said the group hadn’t wanted to join forces on PR but was just informing the province of plans to publish voluntary standards for shale gas drilling. Still, critics saw the memo as proof of an overly cozy relationship between the government and the industry. Bart Johnson, a spokesman for Alberta’s Energy Minister, said the petroleum producers had suggested a joint PR initiative but dropped the request. Such a collaboration, however, would not have been inappropriate, he said. The government works with industry groups all the time, he said, citing a campaign with education groups against bullying in schools. “Oil and gas is huge in Alberta. It fuels our economy. Indeed it fuels the economy of Canada,” Johnson said. “Any suggestion that we shouldn’t meet with that industry is ridiculous.”

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Canada Becoming Home For Record Fracking

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Loan Modification Process ‘Adding Uncertainty To The Market,’ Delaying Recovery

by on December 18, 2011

Huffington Post…

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Shirley Burnell, a community activist from Oakland, California, has been trying to get her subprime loan restructured since 2007. She never missed a payment, but the adjustable rate mortgage she got in 2004 shot up to a monthly payment she could no longer afford. First she provided documents without getting any response, then she was denied in April by her servicer, Bank of America, for not providing documents it never actually asked for. As one part of the bank appealed that decision and approved her for a trial modification, another part denied her again – twice – providing two new reasons in part based on inaccurate calculations, according to documents reviewed by Reuters. When asked about Burnell’s case, a bank spokesman said she was unable to qualify under “imminent default provisions,” a third reason that Burnell said she had never been given. At one point, Burnell even received notice the bank would accelerate foreclosure proceedings, despite her perfect payment record and the letter itself saying the bank owed her $281.01. “They gave you a funky loan in the first place, and now they’re refusing to work with people to get it worked out,” Burnell said. “It just keeps you upset all the time.” Bank of America is “committed to keeping customers in their homes whenever the homeowner has the financial wherewithal to make reasonable payments and the desire to keep the home,” a spokesman for the bank said. Three years after the foreclosure crisis began, the process to apply for a loan modification remains a bureaucratic nightmare that is complicating the housing recovery and could dull the impact of any Obama administration initiatives in the works. The administration’s biggest foreclosure-prevention effort, the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), targeted to help 3 million to 4 million homeowners, has reached only about a quarter of that since its 2009 inception. The program pushed mortgage servicers to cut interest, extend terms, or defer parts of a loan in an effort to reduce monthly payments and keep borrowers in their homes. But servicers have dragged their feet on providing wide-scale modifications. They continue to lose documents, use inaccurate numbers to issue denials, or both approve and deny applications at the same time, according to housing advocates. “It delays resolution of the problem of defaulting loans and it is adding uncertainty to the market,” said Susan Wachter, a housing expert at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Around one in every 12 mortgages in the country is delinquent, and only a fraction of them have received modifications. “Somehow the borrower is unreachable, or the servicer hasn’t found the right way to reach the borrower, but the fact is, we see (modifications) piercing maybe 10 to 25 percent of the potential population,” said Diane Westerback, a managing director of global surveillance analytics at Standard & Poor’s. Banks have stepped up efforts to deal with the foreclosure crisis since 2009. Chase, for example, set up 82 centers around the country specifically to deal with struggling homeowners. Wells Fargo hosts one-day fairs for homeowners to bring in all of their paperwork and potentially get approved for a modification on the spot. Bank of America says it has completed almost 1 million modifications since 2008, and Wells Fargo says it initiated or completed more than two modifications for every one foreclosure of owner-occupied homes in the past two years. But the majority of homeowners, advocates say, still get stuck in byzantine mazes, with no real enforcement mechanism to pursue under HAMP. “If you get a minor traffic ticket, you get a right to an impartial hearing, but if you are applying for federal home saving assistance, the bank is judge, jury, and executioner,” said Joseph Sant, a lawyer at Staten Island Legal Services who helps defend homeowners facing foreclosure. ‘GOING IN CIRCLES’ It took nearly one year for Hakan Tale to convince his servicer, Chase, that it overvalued his house by more than $100,000 in rejecting a modification. Once he was able to convince Chase of that mistake, it rejected him again, dropping his monthly income by almost $4,000 and determining he didn’t make enough money to qualify, even though his actual income had not changed. In November, more than two years after Tale first sought a modification, Chase asked him to submit an entirely new application. “Maybe they don’t want me to be an example for other people,” said Tale, who lives with his wife and three children in Staten Island, New York. “Any excuse they find, they deny it.” “We have worked with the customer and reviewed his application multiple times, and have been involved in multiple mediation meetings,” a Chase spokesman said. Another Staten Island resident, 77-year-old Hamson McPherson, was first denied a modification two years ago by his servicer, Wells Fargo, after it miscalculated his income. The bank then served him with a foreclosure summons and complaint, which in New York can lead to court-supervised settlement conference. But it stalled on moving forward for so long that McPherson triggered the proceedings himself in August 2011 to try to negotiate an alternative to foreclosure. In October, more than two years after he first applied for a modification, the bank told him there was an investor restriction on the loan, which meant it couldn’t modify it. That investor agreement was public, Wells Fargo told him. But after confronting the bank with that agreement, which did not include any such restriction, the bank told him there was a previously undisclosed secret document that included the restriction. “It’s a nightmare,” McPherson said, “when you have these things, you don’t get proper sleep at all.” In an ironic twist, the hold music played when he called Wells Fargo once was a song called, “Going in Circles.” “I listened to it for five minutes and then hung up because I was so upset,” he said. A Wells Fargo spokesman said the bank has “worked for some time to find payment assistance within the investor guidelines of the loan.” “We continue to work with him to find alternatives to foreclosure,” the spokesman said. ‘NOT DOING THEIR JOB’ Even with staff additions — Chase, for example, added some 10,000 employees to deal with defaults, and Bank of America increased its 5,000 employees to 40,000 — individual negotiators can still have hundreds, or even thousands of cases open, according to housing advocates. Employees can be so overwhelmed that applications languish for months. Banks consider financial documents “stale” within two or three months, forcing homeowners to provide updated documents all over again. While housing counselors have seen some improvements in the past few years, many borrowers are still not even able to email applications in; they have to fax them in, thus creating no real paper trail. Carlos Cespedes, an advocate with the Neighborhood of Affordable Housing in Boston, said his files include 25 faxes of the same document, provided over and over to a servicer that said it never received it or lost it. One of his clients traveled to Central America to obtain her deported husband’s signature on a document renouncing his interest in the property, but had to send that same document six times to her servicer who kept losing it. “These are institutions that have taken a huge amount of bailout money. There should be a level of responsibility to communities,” said Josh Zinner, an advocate with the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project in New York. “HAMP is far from perfect, but the biggest problem is servicers not doing their job.” (Reporting by Aruna Viswanatha; Editing by Xavier Briand) Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions .

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Finding Coal’s Future Might Require A Look Back At The Past

December 12, 2011

WASHINGTON (Reuters / December 11) – As futuristic projects designed to capture carbon from coal-burning industries and store it underground have failed, the two largest consumers of the fuel, the United States and China, hope answers to limiting emissions blamed for global warming lie in the past. Power-generators, coal miners and policy makers had put faith in projects to capture carbon dioxide from coal-fired plants and pump it directly underground into geologic formations for permanent storage. The great hope was that the technology would prevent much of the world’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions from reaching the atmosphere. But so-called carbon capture and storage projects have collapsed like a row of dominoes this year in West Virginia, Scotland and Germany. The stumbling blocks have been high costs for the technology and bleak prospects the world will put a high price on emitting greenhouse gases. Fortunately for those seeking to cut emissions from coal, one industry has profited for nearly four decades from socking away carbon dioxide emissions. That industry, enhanced oil recovery, is hungry for more of the gas. Companies including Denbury Resources and Kinder Morgan have piped carbon dioxide from naturally occurring sources into aging oil fields to push out crude that traditional drilling is unable to reach. As natural sources of carbon dioxide run dry, many of these companies are looking to industrial sources of the gas. Power utilities and other coal-burning companies may find it wiser to link up with this mature industry than to plunge ahead with their own versions of carbon capture and storage. Originally, enhanced oil recovery specialists thought aging oil fields could store about 100 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, or about 5 percent of what would be needed to reduce the threat of climate change. But as researchers learn more about the storage potential of old oil zones, in both China and the United States, they say much more carbon could potentially be stored in these places. “We’ve realized if EOR is going to be a bridge to steep carbon reductions … that bridge is both wider and longer than originally realized,” said Julio Friedmann, the technical program manager at the U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center, formed in 2009 by U.S. President Barack Obama and China’s President Hu Jintao. Experts say success with enhanced oil recovery could give new life to the entire field of carbon capture by enlarging the market for man-made carbon, helping to build out a pipeline network to move it to market, and helping the business become more efficient in shooting the gas underground. “Without commercial transactions, no one knows the price,” said Deborah Seligsohn, an energy expert based in Beijing with the research group the World Resources Institute. She said enhanced oil recovery “would cause the price discovery and all the other commercial relationships that would need to get developed.” If the world does not widely deploy carbon capture and storage by the 2020s, the cost of limiting global temperatures would rise by $1.1 trillion, the International Energy Agency said last month in its annual outlook. This would put an “extraordinary burden” on other low-carbon technologies including wind and solar power, the IEA said. Experts believe carbon dioxide used in enhanced oil recovery can be stored permanently underground because over time it is absorbed in brine and eventually mineralizes into a more stable form. But there are risks, including pushing up water that contains heavy metals and other pollutants. Still, backers say the water can be re-injected underground. An added benefit of enhanced oil recovery is the extra oil that could be produced in areas that have not traditionally been big petroleum centers such as Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois in the United States and Inner Mongolia in China. As China scours the world in search of new oil supplies, one hope is that the country’s old oilfields in the Bohai Gulf, which also happen to be near chemical plants that burn large amounts of coal, could see a second life. China currently pumps its old oilfields with water, which is scarce, or polymers, which can be expensive. After an initial investment in pipelines and other infrastructure, using carbon dioxide to push out China’s oil could be a viable option. So far, the United States leads China in enhanced oil recovery partly because small U.S. technology companies have been more nimble than China’s big oil companies. “It’s smaller guys that do this cutting edge, creative stuff, and China doesn’t have independent oil companies,” said WRI’s Seligsohn. But China’s Science and Technology Minister Wan Gang recently hosted an international conference on using emissions for coal plants, signaling the government is serious about moving into this industry. And China boasts at least one advantage that even its huge state oil companies are finding hard to ignore: Its fleet of chemical plants that run on coal provide a far purer stream of carbon dioxide than coal-fired power plants do. That type of discovery has made researchers more hopeful the United States and China can work together. “The more we’ve studied it, the better it works,” said CERC’s Friedmann. “The question is how to create a social legal regulatory framework to enable this technology.” (Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by David Gregorio) Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions .

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Mohamed A. El-Erian: Neither a Quick Nor Comprehensive European Fix

December 10, 2011

As a New York Jets fan, I despair of all the talk about the New England Patriots. Yes they have an amazing combination in Coach Belichick and quarterback Brady; and yes they have incredibly talented tight ends and, in Wes Welker, one of the most dedicated players in football. But do I need to keep on hearing about it over and over again; and must I constantly worry about what the Patriots mean for the wellbeing of my Jets? I desperately want to wish the Patriots away, but I cannot. They matter. After all, the Jets are in the same division, we play them at least twice a year, and they often control our path to the playoffs. When it comes to Europe, investors around the world also face this exasperating combination of having, but not wishing to pay close attention. Every week, if not every day, Europe influences stocks, overwhelms sector-specific news, and frustrates careful security selection. The result is wave after wave of manic risk on and risk off days, together with spiking correlations and unsettling volatility. A week ago, markets were hoping that the combination of an ECB policy meeting and yet another Summit of European leaders would allow them to leave behind — not for a day or a week, but for months and quarters — the unsettling European cloud. Unfortunately, neither was decisive enough; and yet another golden opportunity was insufficiently exploited by European policymakers. Don’t get me wrong, the two events did produce important results. Yet, given the scale and scope of the European crisis, they are not enough. Put differently, what came out is necessary but not sufficient. The ECB took bold steps to help banks facing crippling liquidity challenges. But it poured cold water on the notion that it was ready to go “all in” to stabilize the European sovereign debt problems. At their Summit , leaders provided the foundation for a potentially stronger and less imperfect Eurozone. But they did not go far enough in combining the emphasis on fiscal discipline with growth and jobs, together with real institutional robustness. Meanwhile, they opened what could well prove to be quite a destabilizing Pandora’s box. British Prime Minister Cameron would have no part of the treaty changes proposed by his French and German counterparts. I suspect that this is a leading indicator of broader political strains that will get worse. Additional tensions are likely to surface as leaders return to their domestic constituencies and, importantly, as the Summit’s broad agreements get translated into specifics. This is not only about stress between the 17 Eurozone countries and the 10 other members of the European Union (such as Britain) that are not members of the zone. It is also about frictions within each group. European leaders still need to do a lot more, and quickly, if they are to catch up and get ahead of the crisis. Accordingly, and regrettably, the specter of volatility caused by European headlines will not recede for long. Investors need to continue to watch and worry about Europe… and I have no choice but to continue to watch and worry about the Patriots. This post was originally published on CNBC . The views expressed are the author’s own.

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What Do Employees Think Of Corporate Sustainability?

December 8, 2011

Do employees support and engage with corporate sustainability strategies? According to a new report, it depends. Brighter Planet, an organization which uses “hard numbers and raw data” to explore opportunities and trends in sustainability , has released the results of its second biennial survey on employee engagement with sustainability, and discovered several important trends. Brighter Planet states that since 2009, they have found that corporate sustainability programs are ” becoming less effective as they spread .” Their results suggest that “employee weariness at ineffective sustainability initiatives could undermine promising progress.” Additionally, they found that the most effective companies are those that promote a breadth of sustainability programs, especially in “emerging green issues like procurement, water use, and business travel,” and companies that make a point of collecting data on “their footprint, the impact of staff travel and commuting, and employee sustainability efforts.” The organization writes that its survey includes responses from almost 1,000 individuals in 47 states and 51 countries , including employees from “WalMart, Visa, UPS, Coca-Cola, Exxon, McDonalds, the U.S. Government, and many other leading organizations.” If you’re weary of companies that may be “greenwashing,” check out HuffPost blogger Candice Batista’s list of resources for sifting through companies’ environmental claims. Click here to view advertisements from companies that may have less than sustainable intentions. To read Brighter Planet’s full report on employee sustainability engagement, click here .

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DOWNTOWN THROWDOWN: Unhappy Neighbor Serves SFMOMA An Appeal

December 5, 2011

While the SFMOMA has been giddily releasing plans about the $500 million expansion project, a potentially party-ruining battle has been brewing with an unhappy neighbor: The W Hotel. As The Huffington Post reported earlier , the hotel spoke out against the museum when the Planning Commission reviewed the expansion’s environmental impact report, but the commission waved the complaint aside. And now the hotel is playing hardball. According to SFGate , the hotel filed an appeal of the environmental impact report, claiming that the museum failed to mention how the plan will affect the flow of traffic in the area. The appeal claims that the hotel will be adversely affected by “the project’s closure of the mid-block area that the W Hotel relies upon for loading/unloading and valet activities,” according to SFGate . “These activities will be moved onto Third Street, Howard and New Montgomery, exacerbating an already congested area.” Anyone familiar with the unbelievable traffic headache that is the Third Street/Howard Street/New Montgomery block can probably understand the W’s gripe. (Have you tried to make a left on Howard lately?) But with unrelenting support of the SFMOMA expansion from both the public and the City, the hotel is painted as a bit of a poor sport in the situation. “They’re going to look out and see a great museum,” said Snohetta’s Craig Dykers to SFGate . “When you live in a city, these things happen. And that’s what makes a city great.” The announcement of the appeal came just days after Snohetta, the firm designing the expansion, released a fresh batch of renderings, a video and details about the plans for the new interior. Check out plans for SFMOMA’s expansion in the video and slideshow below:

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China Signals Coming Shift In Measuring CO2 Limits

December 2, 2011

DURBAN, South Africa — An influential Chinese analyst says his country may adjust how it measures carbon emission targets as early as 2020, bringing it more in line with Western governments and signaling a possible opening in international climate negotiations. Xu Huaqing, a senior researcher for China’s Energy Research Institute, was quoted Friday in the semiofficial China Daily as saying Beijing could set absolute caps on its carbon emissions – comments later confirmed privately by one of China’s top climate negotiators on the sidelines of the international climate talks in South Africa. It was the first time China has mentioned a timetable toward a hard emissions cap, the article said, and was seen as a significant move by veteran China watchers. Until now, China has spoken of emissions controls purely in terms of energy intensity, or the amount of energy it uses per unit of economic production. It pledged last year to reduce its energy input by 40 to 45 percent from 2005 levels by 2020. China is the world’s largest emitter of heat-trapping greenhouse gas and a main foil of industrial countries in U.N. negotiations on an accord to control global emissions. Virtually every statement, official or from one of China’s approved think tanks like the energy institute, is parsed and dissected by delegates seeking departures from its public positions. Most other countries have set targets for controlling emissions in absolute terms. The European Union, for example, has committed to slash total emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels by 2020. The change in emissions limits does not mean that China will begin reducing them immediately. As its economy grows, its emissions will continue to rise, probably into the 2030s, Xu was quoted as saying. Jake Schmidt, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said Xu is considered a conservative, and his words carry more punch than if they came from one of the more liberal analysts of the think tank. “Sometimes China floats ideas from groups like the ERI,” that carry weight even though they are not official policy, Schmidt said. Su Wei, head of the Chinese delegation at the 192-party talks, confirmed Xu’s comments in a private meeting with nongovernment organizations late Thursday. But Su said the shift would be dependent on the state of China’s development at the time, said Fuquiang Yang, also of the U.S.-based Natural Resources Defense Council who once was a researcher for Xu’s prestigious think tank. Elaborating on Xu’s statement, Su told the nonprofit groups that a shift to absolute caps depended on how far China had moved toward a low-carbon economy, whether it had improved its energy efficiency, and whether it can obtain and deploy new technologies. It also wanted to see efficiency reflected in Chinese consumer behavior, said Fuquiang. In a public meeting Friday, Su said China needed to continue its development. Although it would do its part in fighting climate change, he said, China “needs to have a reasonable consumption of energy … Emissions must grow to meet the needs of the people.” The climate talks began Monday and continue next week with the arrival of higher ranking delegations. The U.N. said it expected 12 heads of state, mostly from Africa, and 136 Cabinet ministers to attend the final four days of talks, which are due to end Dec. 9.

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Jeffrey Sachs: Fairness and the Occupy Movement Revisited

November 28, 2011

A recent Wall Street Journal article by Arthur C. Brooks on the Occupy Movement and fairness (“Fairness and the ‘Occupy’ Movement, November 25) says some interesting things about potential common ground between free-market ideas and the Occupy movement. Yet Brooks also commits some very important errors. Perhaps with clearer facts there could be more common ground on reforming the economy and politics. Brooks, the head of the American Enterprise Institute, denounces crony capitalism as the dark side of American politics and economics. On this we should all agree. The level of corruption in Washington is staggering, growing, and rife in both parties. The White House and Congress dispense billions of dollars of favors to political supporters like a non-stop vending machine. The new book by Peter Schweitzer on crony capitalism ( Throw Them All Out , Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) should be required reading. Even if wrong on some particulars, as some members of Congress charge, its overall message is powerful and correct. Where Brooks goes wrong is his description of inequality and fairness. The Republican view, which he espouses, is to reduce taxes, cut government services, and let markets be the standard of fairness. Here Brooks is deceptive in his rendition of the facts. First, Brooks downplays the extent of inequality that has been built up in thirty years of crony capitalism. He favorably writes that “every income quintile has seen a real increase in purchasing power of at least 18% over the past 30 years,” citing a recent study of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Yet the real point of the CBO report, which Brooks does not mention, is that the richest 1% enjoyed a staggering rise of 275%, while the poorest stumbled by with a meager 18% gain. Moreover, the CBO report takes the data only to 2007. By now, even those meager gains at the bottom have been mostly lost. Second, Brooks fails to note that the situation for the poor will be drastically worse if federal transfer programs are cut as the Republican Party is urging. The poorest quintile depends on these federal programs to stay alive. If the poorest Americans had to survive without government support, their incomes would be slashed to disastrous levels. The Republicans answer to crony capitalism is to slash government. Yet by this they mean mainly an attack on the remaining social programs. This is a kind of bait-and-switch strategy: rev up the anger against government corruption, and then kill the life-support programs of the poor and working class. Crony capitalism exists mainly in the big-ticket sectors of the economy — banking, oil, real estate, private health insurance, military contractors, and infrastructure — not in the essential but much smaller parts of the economy: malnutrition of poor children, lack of quality pre-school, insufficient job training, and inadequate student loan coverage. Yes, crony capitalism should be confronted anywhere in the economy, yet cutting the life-support systems for the working class and poor won’t fix government, but instead would cripple the prospects of more than 100 million poor and near-poor Americans. To control crony capitalism, we need to direct our attention where it belongs: the wealth-support systems of the rich, not the life-support systems of the poor. Here are five specific actions against crony capitalism that should appeal across the political spectrum. First, restore the Glass-Steagall Act’s separation of commercial banking and investment banking, and strongly regulate derivatives trading. The financial casino continues to infect the core of the banking system and the real economy. Second, prosecute the law-breakers of the 2008 crisis. Virtually every marquee firm on Wall Street, including Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan, committed financial fraud. Lead bankers who oversaw the fraudulent practices are still in place, and need to go. Third, retire politicians like Congressman Paul Ryan who pressed for financial deregulation on the grounds of “free markets,” but who then called for Wall Street bailouts when the crisis hit. They are the agents of moral hazard. Fourth, end the rampant tax loopholes that allow America’s biggest companies to park their profits in the Caribbean tax havens. Rather than giving tax amnesties to these companies, we should pull the plug on these tax abuses. Fifth, crack down on Congressional insider trading. Members of Congress are not only swayed by their big campaign contributors and the lobbyists who hire their families and staff, but also by the prospect of personal gains through trading on their insider information and access to sweetheart deals. Congress’s approval rating is on its way to zero. The biggest point of contention between the free-marketers like Brooks and the Occupy Movement is the affirmative role of government in American society. Today’s free-marketers need to re-learn the wisdom of Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman, whom they praise but don’t read. These earlier free-market advocates were very clear about the need for government to help the poor, protect the environment, and provide public goods including scientific research and infrastructure. Today’s free-marketers are different. They downplay the suffering of the poor and the extent of inequality. They deny the science of climate change. They stand by as the public infrastructure collapses. They disdain the hallowed tradition of federal support for science and education. They subscribe instead to the ugly philosophy of Ayn Rand, who preached that there is no such thing as society or social responsibility, only a collection of individuals. Rand’s philosophy is a tribute to greed, hate, and ruthlessness. Smith, Hayek, and Friedman would have been aghast. So are most Americans. Yes, Mr. Brooks, let us find common ground. We all agree on the need to end crony capitalism. But let us also work together not to cripple government but to make it work for all Americans.

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Obama: Health, Economic Factors Will Be Taken Into Account In Keystone Decision

November 2, 2011

By Jeff Mason and Matt Spetalnick WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama said Tuesday health and economic factors would be taken into account when he decides whether to approve TransCanada Corp’s Canada-to-Texas Keystone XL pipeline proposal. Speaking in a television interview, Obama said the State Department would give him a report on the issue “over the next several months.” That could indicate a delay in the decision, which the State Department had previously targeted for the end of this year. Obama’s inclinations about the pipeline are being closely watched by environmentalists, who oppose the project, and proponents, who say it would create jobs. “My general attitude is, what’s best for the American people? What’s best for our economy both short term and long term? But also what’s best for the health of the American people?” Obama said in an interview with Nebraska television station KETV, discussing the criteria he would judge when making a final decision. The White House has made clear that the State Department is handling the review process, but activists believe the final call will be made by the White House, and Obama’s discussion of the criteria indicated he would have the final say. “We need to make sure that we have energy security and aren’t just relying on Middle East sources, but there’s a way of doing that and still making sure that the health and safety of the American people and folks in Nebraska are protected,” Obama said. “And that’s how I’ll be measuring these recommendations when they come to me.” Opposition is crystallizing in Nebraska, where the pipe would cross the Ogallala Aquifer and the Sand Hills region, home to whooping cranes and other endangered species. Obama, whose re-election in 2012 depends largely on his ability to bring down high U.S. unemployment, said the potential for job creation would factor in to the decision, but health and environmental factors would also weigh. “I think folks in Nebraska, like all across the country, aren’t going to say to themselves, ‘we’ll take a few thousand jobs’ if it means that our kids are potentially drinking water that would damage their health or if … rich land that is so important to agriculture in Nebraska ends up being adversely affected,” he said. (Editing by Eric Walsh) Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions .

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Could Your Starbucks Frappuccino Be Endangered?

October 16, 2011

Starbucks lovers, beware. It looks like your precious coffee could be on the endangered list thanks to climate change . “What we are really seeing as a company as we look 10, 20, 30 years down the road – if conditions continue as they are – is a potentially significant risk to our supply chain, which is the Arabica coffee bean,” said Starbucks Sustainability Director Jim Hanna in a phone interview with the Guardian . In addition to Central America’s farmers already feeling the effects of global warming on their crops, Hanna told the Guardian of his plans to visit Washington to speak to members of Congress at a Union of Concerned Scientists event to speak about climate change and coffee . The move comes after rumors circulated this week that Starbucks might be considering juice bars . Though there’s no formal confirmation of switching from coffee to juice, this could symbolize the coffee chain’s attempt to secure its future business in the face of unpredictable weather, by varying its offerings and looking beyond coffee. The Starbucks website addresses climate change , writing, “In addition to increased erosion and infestation by pests, coffee farmers are reporting shifts in rainfall and harvest patterns that are hurting their communities and shrinking the available usable land in coffee regions around the world. This isn’t the first time a commodity has been threatened by global warming. Earlier this month, a report came out by the International Center For Tropical Agriculture warning chocolate could become a luxury item if farmers don’t adapt to rising temperatures in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, where a majority of the world’s cocoa is grown. Just this past week, peanut butter brands announced price hikes up to 40% thanks to the worst peanut harvest in 30 years from severe weather. Other products reportedly affected by climate change include French wine and Italian pasta .

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Why Do We Have Such A Shortage Of Drugs?

October 14, 2011

Two years into an escalating shortage of life-saving cancer drugs, regulators and lawmakers are still unable to identify why it is happening, let alone how to solve the problem. Hospitals and doctors across the country are postponing care or using second-best or more costly alternatives. The shortages have also forced delays in clinical trials for cancer, which use these drugs as a baseline to test the effectiveness of novel therapies. While work-arounds can help for a while, what is perhaps most worrying is that the officials in charge of addressing the problem are no closer to identifying the underlying causes. In the balance are hundreds of thousands of patients, and potentially millions, who may not get the full care they need. “Anybody who is sure they know the answer to this question is probably kidding themselves,” said Peter Lurie, a senior adviser in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Office of the Commissioner, who works on public health issues, including drug shortages. “There appear to be multiple factors that are playing in it and it’s very difficult to identify which one is most important,” Lurie told Reuters. Drug shortages have been around for years in the United States, but they were previously intermittent and largely temporary, pharmacists and doctors say. They have shot up in a very short time, with a record of over 200 scarce medicines this year alone, up from 56 in 2006, according to FDA data. Health providers say the companies who make these drugs, long sold in generic form, have a diminishing interest in ensuring a strong supply. After a wave of consolidation, only five to seven companies produce 80 percent of these medicines, and stricter reimbursement policies have cut into the profits. But a group representing companies such as Watson Pharmaceuticals Inc and Sandoz, a division of Novartis AG, blames the FDA for introducing unnecessarily strict inspections and shutting down manufacturing facilities for minor issues. The finger pointing and lack of answers is leaving health providers and patients exasperated. “Something has to be done soon in order to try to alleviate this problem,” said Dr. Michael Link, the current president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), a non-profit group of cancer doctors and other providers.. “Right now we’re already seeing patient care suffering… I think you’re seeing a groundswell of concern.” In the meantime, distributors in the so-called “gray market” are exploiting the situation to peddle the drugs at hundred-fold mark-ups, according to lawmakers investigating the situation. Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, has called for an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. And last week, Representative Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat in the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, asked five companies in the gray market to provide information on their sales and how they obtain the drugs. PATIENTS IN THE BALANCE In a July survey of 820 hospitals by the American Hospital Association, more than four-fifths of hospitals said they had to delay treatment and more than half could not provide patients with the recommended drug for their disease. Sixty-nine percent of patients had to settle for a less effective drug. The non-profit Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) has reports of at least 15 patients dying from drug shortages since last September. In the most high-profile case, nine patients died from contaminated IV fluid in Alabama this past March, when the typical supply was unavailable. Of the 140,000 patients diagnosed with colorectal cancer each year, about 80,000 are expected to rely on typical treatments such as fluorouracil or leucovorin, both currently in short supply, said Nancy Roach, a board member at the patient group Fight Colorectal Cancer. The government is trying to create a better notification system for shortages, which could address some of the most immediate issues for patients. Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, along with Robert Casey, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, introduced a bill in February that would force drug companies to inform the FDA about looming shortages. The FDA said early notification helped it prevent 99 shortages so far this year. But the bill does little to prevent shortages in the long-term. “People aren’t in agreement on how to solve it in the long term, and not a lot of bills are going through Congress,” Klobuchar told Reuters. MARKET PERFECT STORM The FDA began tracking drug shortages closely in 1999. Over a decade later, they have only gotten worse. Sterile injectables such as the cancer drugs, make up the lion’s share and accounted for 132 out of 178 shortages in 2010. Most are generic and have been around for years, meaning profit margins are lower. The FDA can explain the immediate causes of the shortages — in 2010, over half of them came from product quality and “significant” manufacturing problems such as metal shavings found in vials or fungal contamination, said Sandra Kweder, deputy director of the FDA’s Office of New Drugs. But these reasons fail to address why these problems have gotten so much worse, officials and industry analysts said. Industry consolidation and lower inventory levels could exacerbate the problem, leaving less slack in the system to deal with shortages when they arise, the FDA said. The agency has also blamed an increasing number of production issues on older facilities that need to be renovated as manufacturers in the low-margin generic market avoid investments in maintenance. Makers of sterile injectables Teva, Hospira and Bedford Laboratories, part of privately-held Boehringer Ingelheim, have all had manufacturing issues in the past few years, shuttering production on multiple drug lines. The FDA also acknowledges some manufacturers may have less financial incentive to make older, cheaper generic drugs. In 2010, 11 percent of shortages were due to companies that stopped making a certain drug, usually for business reasons. Manufacturers are loathe to make a connection between the financial incentives and producing older medicines. Several, including Teva Pharmaceuticals and Hospira, say they are building new facilities as a back-up for future shortages. The industry lays part of the blame with the FDA. The Generic Pharmaceutical Association (GPhA) said the agency has become more focused on enforcement in the past three years, shutting down factories for smaller problems that would have been dealt with less drastically in the past. STALLED PROPOSALS Various proposals to address the long-term problem have stalled, not least because of the disagreement over the cause. They include creating a national stockpile for emergency injectables — just like for vaccines — or offering tax incentives for manufacturers of low-cost but life-saving products. But those are unlikely to gain favor as the U.S. government is scrambling to cut costs and reduce the national debt, lawmakers and industry players said. The International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services are both investigating the issue, and a Government Accountability Office report is due to come out in November, according to a congressional staffer. In the meantime, doctors like Steven Abrams, at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, work to make sure newborn infants with intestinal damage have enough calcium and phosphates. These essential minerals – manufactured by APP Pharmaceuticals, a company in the Fresenius Kabi Group, and Hospira – have been in short supply since April, Dr. Abrams said, forcing him to ration treatment to those most in need. “Our task is to continue to advocate for long-term solutions,” he said. “And the second is to manage this problem day to day. That’s just what we have to do, … to make sure the babies get the medicine they need.” Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions .

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French Company Wins Federal License For U.S. Uranium Plant

October 13, 2011

BOISE, Idaho — France’s state-owned nuclear reactor builder on Wednesday won a U.S. license to build and operate a gas centrifuge uranium enrichment plant in Idaho, a key step in the company’s plans to expand production of nuclear fuel in the United States. The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s license for the $3 billion Eagle Rock Enrichment Facility authorizes Areva SA to enrich uranium for use in the manufacture of nuclear fuel for commercial power reactors. The project could supply 104 U.S. nuclear power plants, company spokesman Jarret Adams said. The plant near Idaho Falls could be in operation by 2014, but Areva hasn’t given final word on when construction will begin. That’s because an ongoing review of planned capital investments by new Chief Executive Officer Luc Oursel and his management team has put a final decision on hold. A vote on whether to begin building the plant in 2012 is due by Dec. 31, said Adams, who is based in Bethesda, Md. The facility’s full output would cover about a quarter of demand from U.S. nuclear power plants, although Areva does have competition. A newly built enrichment plant operated by Urenco USA in New Mexico is up and running, with the NRC in August giving the go-ahead for the facility to double its capacity to process nuclear fuel. Areva’s project previously received a $2 billion loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy. Nuclear power opponents who have been fighting the enrichment plant since Areva won tax concessions from the 2008 Idaho Legislature contend there’s already plenty of nuclear fuel in the U.S. The Snake River Alliance also points to Germany’s and Switzerland’s separate decisions to phase out nuclear energy by 2022 following the meltdown in Japan earlier this year. “There is not, never has been and never will be a need for this dangerous uranium enrichment factory,” alliance executive director Liz Woodruff said. “There is an ample supply of enriched uranium worldwide today and the government has seriously miscalculated the need for more of it.” The NRC said it will inspect Areva’s site during construction. Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson, who represents the district where the plant will be built, said Areva has a strong safety record. “The technology that Eagle Rock will use has been well proven in numerous locations in the United States and Europe,” he said. He added that the plant will create hundreds of new jobs for eastern Idaho. The desert region just southwest of Yellowstone National Park is already home to the Idaho National Laboratory, where employees since 1949 have conducted research into nuclear energy and still work on projects ranging from national defense to next-generation nuclear reactors.

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Oil Refinery Faces Record Fines Over Clean Air Act Violations

October 13, 2011

NEW ORLEANS — A Texas company that owns a refinery in southwestern Louisiana pleaded guilty Wednesday to felony violations of the federal Clean Air Act and obstructing justice and agreed to pay a record fine. Pelican Refining LLC will pay $12 million for problems at its Lake Charles refinery, including $2 million for air pollution monitoring and other environmental projects in the state, according to a plea agreement reached in federal court. A judge must approve the agreement. The Justice Department said the criminal fines would be the largest ever in Louisiana for violations of the Clean Air Act It also said Houston-based Pelican acknowledged that it had violated numerous standards in its permit – including emissions of potentially deadly hydrogen sulfide – and submitted false emissions reports to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. Byron Hamilton, the Pelican vice president who oversaw operations at the refinery since 2005 from an office in Houston, pleaded guilty on July 6 to two Clean Air Act violations. He faces up to a year in prison and a $200,000 fine for each count, according to authorities. “We regret this chapter in our history” but Pelican and its employees have worked diligently since 2007 to make sure the refinery meets state and federal laws, company spokeswoman Dorothy Beeler said. Federal authorities said they opened an investigation after state inspectors in 2006 discovered illegal releases of hydrogen sulfide, improperly repaired or bypassed pollution monitoring and control equipment and oil stored in unrepaired tanks. The refinery also had no company budget, no environmental department and no environmental manager, according to Pelican’s court admission. The flare used by the refinery to burn off emissions – including hydrogen sulfide – was not properly functioning and employees typically took turns trying to relight it with a flare gun, the government said. Also as part of the plea agreement, Pelican would be banned from operating a refinery until it implements an environmental compliance plan, including external auditing by independent firms and oversight by a court-appointed monitor.

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Penny Herscher: Five Keys to Leadership for Women in Technology

September 18, 2011

Do women lead differently than men? Yes, usually. Do women face more barriers than men? Frequently. But do women sometimes hold themselves back ? Yes. Tech companies are competitive and dominated by men. Fact. So how, as a woman, do you adapt and learn how to lead in that environment? Based on my experience growing up professionally in tech, and as a hardcore tech CEO (of FirstRain ), here are a few of the keys that make a difference. You don’t have to deny that you are a woman or act like a man, but you do need to pay attention and lead in ways that make your impact to the business bottom line stand out. Here are five keys to leadership and each one is the flip side of a common soft spot for women: 1. Embrace making decisions — they are fun Companies need people who are decisive and courageous. A common issue with new entrepreneurs and young managers is that they hesitate to make decisions. It’s tough when you don’t know what to do, but it’s better to make a decision quickly and decisively, and be ready to change it if you are wrong, than to hesitate, hash it over many times, or wait for someone else (your board, your team, your boss) — or even worse time and delay — to make it for you. Making decisions gets easier when you learn to trust yourself and your judgement — you can feel in your gut and in the tips of your fingers what to decide. Never underestimate your own intuition — it’s not a myth, it’s real. I simply did not understand or trust this until I read Blink — I recommend all new managers read it. I am not always right, and I definitely need and value advice, but I learned to trust, move forward fast, knowing that if I am wrong I’ll also figure that out quickly, or someone I trust will correct me. 2. Never ask whether, ask when This is a mindset that many men are good at. They come out of of the womb asking when they’ll get that raise, when they’ll be promoted, when they’ll go kill that bear, not whether. Women so often talk about whether. Should I push for that promotion, should I ask for more money, will I get funded, will they promote a woman, will they like me? Working with mostly men, and a few women, I see a pattern in the successful women. They don’t ask whether they have a right to what they want, they assume they’ll get it. They don’t particularly care what other people think of them, they care about getting the job done. They act like they are competent, it’s in their future, they are going to get it, and there is not any question of whether, just when. 3. Hire your betters The fastest way to build a great team is to hire people who are smarter and more experienced than you in their field, and if you are technical these are probably mostly men today. It can be intimidating to interview people who are senior to you — I know. It can be downright frustrating when you talk to some men who, when they meet you, talk down to you because you are blond and forget that you are interviewing them (can you tell I’ve been through this?). Remember, you don’t need to be “the man” — you need to get the job done better than anyone else. Stay focused on your vision for your team. A group of people who work for and with you, all of whom are smarter than you in some dimension but who want to climb the hill with you. Plan to grow into being their leader and if they are good people they will give you space to do it. Give in to fear of being usurped and you’ll fail because you don’t hire a strong enough team. I confess I used to always try to hire my “elders and betters.” As time goes by the first becomes more difficult, but thankfully the second is still easy! 4. Speak up and be sure you are heard I have often heard the complaint that a woman will say something in a meeting, not have her idea acknowledged and then a man will say the same thing and everyone will jump on a agree. There are even TV ads that make fun of this reality. Given that this does happen, develop some tactics that help you be heard, and help you confirm that you have been heard. State your input and then ask a question that causes your co-workers to engage in your idea. Repeat yourself in different words. Go to the white board to sketch your concept — whether it is a process or a product idea — it’s really hard to ignore the person at the white board. If you are in an online meeting call on a co-worker by name to get their direct input on your idea. What does not work is either getting annoyed that you are not heard, or speaking your piece and then waiting politely — both are easy ways for you to be dismissed. 5. Put the company first and get results And finally — the playing field is not level. Fact. Deal with it. To lead men and get ahead in a man’s world you need to work harder, be smarter and be more ambitious than the men around you. The CEO lives in the place where the company and it’s results are all that matter to her. So practice that. In everything you do put the company first, ahead of your professional needs. Ahead of office politics. This does not mean you don’t have a life. Many of today’s women leaders are married with children; it’s possible, but at work you need to be focused. Drive to results, be sure you get recognition for your results, and you will get ahead and become a leader. Male dominance of tech is not going to change quickly so don’t complain, or hesitate — just get on with it. And if you are a leader men, and women, will follow you. When you look over your shoulder you will know.

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BP executives get U.S. investor lawsuit dismissed

September 16, 2011

By Moira Herbst (Reuters) – Current and former BP executives and directors won dismissal on Thursday of one of several U.S.-shareholder lawsuits filed over last year’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill. A federal court in Houston said it was more appropriate that investors file their lawsuit in the United Kingdom because the company is based in London. “English law governs this dispute and will determine whether the individual defendants breached their fiduciary duties and harmed BP in the process,” wrote U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison. BP declined to comment. Plaintiffs’ attorneys did not respond to a request for comment. The U.S. court could reassert jurisdiction if the UK courts refuse to take the case, the ruling said. Investors had argued in their lawsuit that the company’s management and board were responsible for the disaster because they knowingly prioritized cost-cutting over safety. Other oil spill-related lawsuits brought by BP shareholders — including one brought by New York and Ohio state pension funds alleging securities fraud and another brought by BP employees alleging violations of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA)– are still before Ellison’s court. Separately, hundreds of cases involving economic loss, wrongful death and personal injury are currently before a federal judge in New Orleans. The Macondo well blow-out led to the death of 11 men and was the biggest offshore oil spill in U.S. history. U.S. authorities placed most of the blame on BP in a report issued on Wednesday. The case is In re BP Shareholder Derivative Litigation, U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas, No. 10-cv03447, (Reporting by Moira Herbst in New York; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)

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The Economics of Oktoberfest

September 16, 2011

By Brian Blackstone of the Wall Street Journal Germany has been in open revolt over the European Central Bank‘s policy of buying the government debt of struggling euro-zone economies such as Spain and Italy, arguing that it is destabilizing and potentially inflationary. Now we may know why: Oktoberfest is getting awfully pricey. According to UniCredit‘s Munich-based economist Alexander Koch, Oktoberfest inflation — measured by the cost of transportation, two Mass (or liter) of beer and half a grilled chicken — is set to rise 3.3% this year from a year ago. (Read the report here.) That’s well above the ECB’s 2% target for euro-zone inflation. The 178th annual Oktoberfest begins in Munich on Saturday at noon with the Munich mayor’s declaration: “O’zapft is,” meaning “it is tapped.” Beer prices have already been set at an average of nine euros per liter, an increase from last year, Koch writes in his research note: “Oktoberfest 2011: A Somewhat Different Safe Haven.” It is unclear how much effect the escalating debt crisis in southern Europe and Ireland will have on Oktoberfest this year. Of the three countries in EU-IMF bailouts, only Ireland ranks in the top 10 of foreign visitors to Munich for the festivities, and it only accounts for 2%. But Italy, where austerity measures have been enacted to bring down a large debt load, ranks first. The U.S., which has its own economic woes, is second. Read the entire post here. More from the Wall Street Journal : ‘SpongeBob’ Hurts Gratification-Delay Skills Video: Does America Really Need More Jobs? Housing Crisis Hits Billionaire’s Beach

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Boeing scrubs planned first delivery of 747-8F

September 16, 2011

By Kyle Peterson (Reuters) – Boeing Co on Friday said it would not make the planned first delivery of its 747-8 Freighter to Cargolux on Monday, citing “unresolved issues” with the airline. The plane-maker, which had planned three days of celebrations to mark the long-awaited first delivery, did not disclose the problem and referred questions to the customer. A Cargolux spokeswoman was unreachable by phone and did not immediately respond to an e-mailed request for comment. Boeing spokesman Jim Proulx said the plane-maker was working with Cargolux to resolve the issues. He declined to say how the snag would affect the 747-8F delivery schedule. “We are working with our customer to determine a date for delivery,” Proulx said. Boeing, the world’s second-largest airplane maker, was set to make first delivery of the freighter version of its elongated 747 to a customer on Monday, marking the start of a new chapter in the life of the aircraft that has been Boeing’s most recognizable plane for decades. Cargolux, Europe’s largest all-cargo airline, was scheduled to take possession of the 747-8 Freighter amid celebrations at Boeing’s assembly plant in Everett, Washington. While Boeing declined to identify the source of the friction with Cargolux, aviation experts suspected the dispute was over performance guarantees related to fuel consumption of the General Electric engines. The 747-8 features GE’s GEnx-2B67. “The performance problems were well known and they were supposed to be addressed by Boeing and GE,” said Adam Pilarski, senior vice president at AVITAS, an airline consulting company that also works with aircraft lessors and lenders. Pilarski said he had no first-hand knowledge of the matter, but he said the issue probably had been percolating for some time. He said customers sometimes request financial compensation if they believe an airplane will not live up to their expectations. Pilarski said he thinks the issue could be resolved within weeks and that Cargolux will still be the first 747-8 customer. “It will be resolved with financial conditions,” he said. “Right now they are playing chicken.” The 747 was the world’s largest airplane until 2005, when EADS unit Airbus unveiled its A380. Boeing has taken 78 orders for the 747-8 Freighter, which lists at $319.3 million, according to the company’s web site. Boeing also is testing a passenger version of the updated 747-8, dubbed the Intercontinental, which it plans to deliver in the fourth quarter to an unidentified VIP customer. The upgraded 747 promises to burn less fuel, and the passenger version offers more comforts. The plane also boasts new wings, a new tail, state-of-the-art engines and a new cockpit. Production of the 747-8 has been delayed by more than a year, as has the mid-sized 787 Dreamliner, a carbon-composite plane, which represents a bigger leap in technology than the revamped 747-8. The 787 is set for first delivery to All Nippon Airways on September 26. (Reporting by Kyle Peterson in Chicago, editing by Bernard Orr)

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Democratic Senator Comes Out Against Further Unemployment Benefits

August 10, 2011

During a Tuesday visit to a factory in St. Charles, Mo., Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill said she opposed extending federal unemployment benefits. “I’m not for extending the unemployment benefits any further,” McCaskill said in response to a question from local TV station KMOV before saying she would support a continued payroll tax cut. It’s not clear from McCaskill’s statement whether she is opposed to giving the unemployed additional weeks of benefits or if she opposes renewing the existing extra weeks of aid. Members of Congress have frequently been confused on unemployment legislation. McCaskill’s office did not immediately respond to a request for clarification. [ UPDATE: McCaskill's office says additional context omitted from KMOV's report would show that she was responding to a question about giving the unemployed extra weeks of benefits. Her office said she supports preserving the existing extended benefits. "Claire continues to fully support unemployment benefits for people who have lost their jobs by no fault of their own as a result of the struggling economy. This includes up to 99 weeks of unemployment benefits. Unfortunately, expanding benefits beyond 99 weeks -- as some suggest -- is unaffordable and unrealistic because of staunch opposition in the House."] Further extensions of unemployment insurance for the long-term jobless will need all the congressional support they can get. The federal benefits, which can last up to 73 weeks for workers who exhaust the standard 26 weeks of state benefits, are scheduled to expire at the beginning of 2012. Republicans oppose keeping the benefits because of their significant cost to the government — as much as $60 billion a year. President Obama has said he wants Congress to reauthorize the benefits and also a Social Security payroll tax cut, both of which were included in a December deal that preserved Bush-era tax cuts for two years. The unemployment benefits were included in the failed so-called Grand Bargain Obama crafted with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), but they were left out of the debt deal Congress passed earlier this month. Under current law, people who’ve lost their jobs after July 1 are ineligible for extra weeks of benefits because their state aid will run out after the federal benefits expire in January. Nearly 4 million unemployed currently receive federal benefits. McCaskill said she supported keeping the tax cuts: “The payroll tax cuts — I’m always for tax cuts for working folks because I think that helps our consuming economy.” The progressive Economic Policy Institute has estimated that dropping the payroll tax cut and the extended unemployment insurance as planned in 2012 would cost the economy more than a million jobs next year, as the two policies are rated by economists as among the most stimulative.

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Department Of Energy Makes $150M Bet On Solar Tech

June 17, 2011

On Friday, Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu announced a ” game changing ” development in solar energy. A company called 1366 Technologies , headquartered in Lexington, Mass., has developed a silicon solar wafer that would cut the cost of solar cell manufacturing by an estimated 50 percent. The wafer technology was developed with the support of a pilot innovation investment program housed under the Department of Energy, known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E). According to director Arun Majumdar, “ARPA-E is looking for high risk ideas that, if successful, can be high impact. Those that don’t exist today.” Unlike traditional wafers–which are sliced from a large block, resulting in considerable losses of material (up to 50 percent )–these new wafers are individually cast to specific measurements, a more efficient model of production. In 2009, ARPA-E made an initial $4 million dollar investment in 1366 Technologies, and on Friday, announced it would make an additional $150 million dollar loan guarantee to take the company’s research and development to the next level. If projections regarding cost savings are accurate, solar may be on its way to becoming competitive with traditional fossil-fuels — though some in the industry remain concerned about barriers still in place. “There are two main areas of concern: price and value,” said Brian Keane, president of Smart Power , a green energy marketing group. Keane explained that the primary “value” of solar “is that it’s good for the environment. But quite frankly, no American actually thinks that’s good value.” Keane says that U.S. consumers need to be convinced that solar is a viable proposition. “The perception is that solar is an idea from the 1970s that just didn’t work. They think it’s not strong enough to power their lives, compared with oil, coal and nuclear power.” Still, Keane added, “If we can cut the price [of manufacturing] in half, that really helps us with the value proposition to the American people.” Others point to concerns around the marketplace itself. Lew Milford, president of the Clean Energy Group , a non-profit advocacy group focused on energy and climate concerns, said that many new and innovative technologies fail because they never reach commercialization. Milford called this the “valley of death” that innovative tech companies must cross after their initial rounds of funding, and the hurdle that oftentimes prevents them from becoming scalable and reaching market potential. Milford suggested that the problem of access to capital might be solved with something like the President’s suggested–” Clean Energy Bank “–to finance clean energy initiatives, but acknowledged that the highly political climate surrounding budget negotiations would complicate its creation. With ARPA-E in particular, Milford thought that a better and more robust relationship with state governments was essential for the success of the agency’s investments. “In the end, I think states are a really critical backstop for all of this,” he said. “State policy is increasingly going to create these markets.” While many state governors remain skeptical of climate change policy and energy reform on the whole, Milford contended that many of the same governors were nonetheless supportive of clean energy technology, given its potential to create jobs and strengthen state economies. By way of an example, Milford pointed to New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who is critical of climate change concerns but remains “a strong supporter of offshore wind farms in the state.” “ARPA-E just doesn’t have the states as customers,” said Milford, and it still needs to figure out “how to you commercialize the products that it is funding.” ARPA-E director Majumder insisted that the agency already has a close relationship to the states. As evidence, he pointed a program, Sunshot , that specifically addresses the question of cost competitiveness and solar technology. “We have a very close relationship with the states,” he said. Majumder said that one of his primary concerns around solar energy had to do with manufacturing: “In the mid-90s, the U.S. had 40 percent of the manufacturing of photovoltaic cells,” he explained. “Now we have less than 5%. We have to regain that technology lead back — and that will be based on innovation in the U.S.”

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James Bacchus: Indonesian Forest Plan May Be Breakthrough on Climate Change

May 24, 2011

While a majority of the United States House of Representatives continues to hinder U.S. climate actions nationally and internationally by denying that climate change is real and man-made, other countries continue to work together to try to stop it. They have now achieved what may prove to be a notable breakthrough in the battle against global warming with a new plan to protect the remaining virgin forests of Indonesia. Although little noted thus far in the United States, Indonesia has just announced the details of a far-reaching program intended to diminish forest destruction and thereby reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that scientists say are the main cause of climate change. Key to the plan is a two-year moratorium on the issuance of new permits to clear more than 150 million acres of primary forest and carbon-intensive peatlands scattered across the several time zones spanning the thousands of equatorial islands of the vast Indonesian archipelago. The plan is a response to a pledge last year by Norway to invest up to $1 billion in Indonesian conservation efforts if Indonesia would get serious about halting the many devastations of deforestation. The Norwegian offer is part of an ongoing international effort to put forest protection front and center in trying to overcome the serial disappointments of recent worldwide climate summits and begin to put together an effective global architecture to combat climate change. The $1 billion in financing by Norway for “verified emissions reductions” in Indonesia is one of the first concrete results of a United Nations-backed undertaking called “REDD” — a climate acronym for an emerging international agreement to achieve “Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation.” Climate negotiators and campaigners hope REDD will become a building block for an eventual comprehensive global climate treaty. Forests are “sinks” that soak up carbon and store it in trees. About half of the dry weight of a tree consists of stored carbon. When a tree rots or burns, carbon is released into the air and adds to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The decimation of the world’s native forests by the ongoing march of human agriculture and human industrialization has been a major factor in emitting more carbon into the earth’s atmosphere than there has been for the past four million years. Between 15% and 20% of all greenhouse gases worldwide result from deforestation — an amount equal to the emissions of all the world’s cars, trucks, trains, ships, and planes combined. Eighty thousand acres of tropical rainforest are lost every day. An area the size of Costa Rica is lost to deforestation every year. The United Nations Environment Program has concluded that deforestation must be cut in half by 2020 to achieve the goals the world’s governments have set for themselves in international climate change agreements. About half of the remaining forest in the world is in the tropics. Much of it is rainforest, which stores ten times as much carbon as northern native forest. Rainforest, of course, is home to a cornucopia of biodiversity in the form of an ecosystem graced by literally thousands of endangered species of flora and fauna containing genetic resources of immeasurable potential. About one-fifth of the remaining rainforest in the world is in Indonesia. The Indonesian forests have long been under assault from ax and plow alike. Indonesia has lost about 40% of its forest in the past fifty years. Roughly 1.2 million acres have been lost in each of the past ten years. Indonesia has been growing rapidly recently, with high hopes of feeding both the hunger and the aspirations of a people who have suffered much in the past and yearn now for a brighter future. But, coupled with this growth, a combination of logging, crop growing, cattle grazing, and peat burning has caused a level of deforestation that has made Indonesia the world’s third biggest emitter of greenhouse gases — after China and the United States. Now President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia has signed a decree that may become a landmark step toward shifting from rhetoric to action and truly tackling climate change by reducing deforestation. And he has done so, significantly, as part of an overall international endeavor. He has done so, too, in a way that acknowledges implicitly that climate change is an inherently global challenge that can best be confronted successfully by cooperative global action. The Indonesian plan is not all that anyone wanted. There is something in it, or not in it, to disappoint everyone. Some business interests say it goes too far in restricting development. Some environmentalists say it does not go far enough. Questions aplenty remain for Indonesia about how the balance should best be struck between economic production and environmental preservation in implementing the plan. Much is at stake, for example, for the Indonesian growers who serve the world’s $50 billion market for palm oil, a basic ingredient in everything from soap and cake to chocolate and margarine. Indonesia is the world’s leading producer of palm oil. The Indonesian plan appears to ban new palm oil production in virgin forests while focusing on more sustainable production through increased productivity on existing plantations and through expanded planting on already “degraded” secondary lands. Much is at stake, too, for many imperiled animal species. Indonesian authorities will want to heed the warning by Greenpeace that large areas of forest untouched by human hands may be left out of the plan. Of particular concern to all everywhere should be the possibility that these omitted areas could include the last native habitats of such irreplaceable species as the orangutan and the Sumatran tiger. These priceless habitats must be preserved. Yet even the spokesman for Greenpeace was careful to acknowledge in response to the Indonesian announcement that “this moratorium represents an important political shift towards protecting our forests.” And, as Norwegian Environment Minister Eric Solheim said in welcoming the moratorium, it represents a “very serious development choice” by Indonesia. After centuries of colonial rule, followed by long decades of post-colonial struggles, a democratic Indonesia is emerging at last into maturity and into a role of global influence appropriate for the fourth most populous country in the world and the largest economy in Southeast Asia. In embracing this forest plan, ambitious reformers in Indonesia are signaling not only their wish to serve their people by continuing to fuel balanced and sustainable growth for Indonesia, but also their intent to accept their responsibility for keeping their commitment to reduce Indonesia’s greenhouse gas emissions by 26% by 2020. This is an important signal to the wider world. Too bad this news from the far side of the planet has received so little attention to date from the U.S. press or from U.S. politicians. Maybe those Members of Congress who continue to deny there is such a thing as climate change might be inspired to equally visionary action in confronting it if they knew of the example being set by the Government of Indonesia.

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Cost Of Natural Disasters: ‘Ten Billion Dollars Would Be Conservative’

May 19, 2011

This year’s record-breaking tornadoes, floods, droughts and wildfires will cost the country tens of billions of dollars in economic losses — and these estimates are expected to climb as the Mississippi flooding and severe drought in Texas continue into the summer. Economists disagree about the precise figures — with the estimates varying by billions — but most agree that $10-15 billion in losses are conservative calculations. Severe weather in April alone — the month when record-breaking tornadoes tore through much of the Southeast and killed more than 300 people — cost the country $12 billion in economic losses, according to Steven Bowen, a meteorologist with the Impact Forecasting team of Aon Benfield, one of the world’s largest insurance brokers. The cost estimates for the flooding in Louisiana and Mississippi range from $3-9 billion, and the ongoing Texas drought, which began in November and has caused more than 10,000 wildfires across the state, has so far cost between $1.5 billion and $3 billion in crop and cattle losses. As the flooding and drought continue, government agencies say that it’s impossible to predict the long-term economic impact of the losses, which include thousands of homes and buildings destroyed by the tornadoes, casinos and ports along the Mississippi temporarily closed, millions of acres of grazing land scorched by the fires and 1 percent of the country’s cropland currently submerged in water. “It’s too early to say what effect this [the flooding] would have on the national economy,” the Department of Agriculture stated in a report on May 11. “Regardless, it probably will not be extensive given the estimated percentage of land affected.” But even as the long-term effect remains unknown, the short-term impact is clear: Individuals and small businesses are absorbing the bulk of these losses, as states, government agencies and insurance companies help foot nature’s bill. April’s tornadoes are expected to wipe thousands of mom-and-pop shops off the map. This region already had a high rate of small business failure, and before April’s disasters between 6,000 and 8,000 small businesses in Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi and Georgia were expected to go under within the year, according to a report by Dun & Bradstreet, a research company that tracks small businesses. After the tornadoes, the number jumped to at least 10,000 shops. “Small businesses are definitely going to bear the brunt of this,” Byron Vielehr, President of Global Risk and Analytics division at Dun & Bradstreet told HuffPost in a telephone interview. The businesses won’t fail immediately, said Vielehr, but when they do it could produce a spike in unemployment and a loss of about a billion dollars in sales, just from these tornado-stricken small businesses alone. The situation of small farmers and ranchers in Texas is similar. After enduring the driest seven months on record, farmers and ranchers are being forced to abandon a cycle of wheat crop and sell off herds. Texas produces 20 percent of the country’s beef, and cattle ranchers are being slammed by the combination of scorched land unable to support grazing, and high feed and hay prices, both of which were driven up by the drought and the fires. “For a rancher, at this point he’s going to be losing about 30 percent of the income he would have averaged in the past,” said Bill Hymen, executive director of the Independent Cattlemen’s Association, the second-largest coalition of ranchers in the state. “And that’s not just this year but going forward because of dwindling seed stock,” he added, referring to the process of fewer cows leading to the birth of fewer calves in the future. As is the case in all industries, when a rancher has less pocket money, that creates a ripple effect in the local economy — with Hymen noting that ranchers, who know it’s likely that the drought will continue through the summer, are buying less and will ultimately pay less in taxes next year. Along the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers, a portion of small businesses and farms will likely follow the same course as the businesses that fell in the tornadoes path. Closed ports and casinos, too, are losing millions of dollars each day in lost river traffic, trade and gambling. Closing the Mississippi river itself causes even more economic damage. On Tuesday, the Coast Guard closed a 15-mile stretch of the Mississippi upriver of New Orleans by Natchez Port, a decision which could lead to losses of hundreds of millions of dollars each day, said Eric M. Holthaus, researcher at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society. The Coast Guard said that this closure is expected to last only a few days, but Holthaus also imagines a nightmare scenario in which the Port of New Orleans — the seat of our country’s agricultural exports and a handful of oil refineries — has to be closed. “I would be talking about trillions of dollars at that point,” he said. As long as the Port of New Orleans stays open, which it likely will, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, commonly known as FEMA, said that right now there is plenty of money in the $2 billion emergency fund to aid the states hit hardest by the natural disasters. FEMA has already approved about $38 million in future storm and tornado rebuilding assistance, including $9.4 million to Mississippi, $80 million to Alabama, $6.6 million to Georgia, $5.9 million for Tennessee and $16 million for Arkansas. For the flooding, FEMA has so far approved more than $11 million, including $1.4 million for Tennessee, $9 million for Missouri and $785,000 for Mississippi. As the flooding continues, the FEMA contribution is expected to rise, and these figures don’t include other public assistance that the regions will receive, either from the federal or state level. Insurance companies, too, are paying out, and April alone produced hundreds of thousands of insurance claims. Still, insurance companies and federal agencies aren’t feeling the hit of $10-15 billion in losses as acutely as individuals, towns and small businesses. “If you’re a small town in western Texas that’s lost anything, that town is going to suffer regardless of how much insurance money they get in the end. Less money in the community will mean that all unrelated jobs will take a hit,” said Holthaus, who said that the same holds true for communities affected by the tornadoes or the floods. “During a recession is a bad time for a disaster to hit,” he said.

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Gwen Ruta: Spreading Sustainability: From the Fortune 500 to the Next 5,000

April 28, 2011

Recently in Harvard Business Review , Michael Porter and Mark Kramer wrote about ” The Big Idea ” — that companies must take the lead by “creating economic value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing its needs and challenges.” Driven by win-win success stories, by a vacuum in policy leadership, and by the embrace of thought leaders like Porter, this idea has surged into the mainstream. Even in the grip of the recession, companies across the Fortune 500 – from Walmart (#1) and GE (#6) to Owens Corning (#431) and SunGard (#472) — are actively pursuing a sustainability agenda. But for the companies that make up mainstream corporate America, environmental issues may still largely be seen as a cost center rather than a competitive edge. What will it take to show these companies that environmental innovation can be an opportunity rather than a burden? How can we spread the principles of sustainability from the Fortune 500 to the next 5,000? Start with energy efficiency Every company uses energy, and can do so more efficiently. The consulting gurus at McKinsey & Company calculate that by deploying an array of NPV-positive efficiency measures, commercial and industrial users could generate $732 billion in energy savings by 2020 while avoiding some 660 million tons of annual greenhouse gas emissions. In other words, we can make a lot of money and cut a lot of emissions simultaneously by using proven technologies. But, it’s not quite as easy as it sounds. Companies fail to reap the benefits of energy efficiency for reasons that have nothing to do with what we learned in Econ 101. In the real world, managers are overburdened, useful information is hard to find, lease arrangements stand in the way of smart investments, and competition for corporate dollars is sharp. Sometimes it takes “fresh eyes” to overcome the barriers to change. Our EDF Climate Corps program uses business students to find energy savings opportunities at participating companies. In just 10 weeks at 50 companies last summer, we found $350 million in potential operating savings. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Stimulate innovation Environmental goals, combined with open networking, can be a great way to stimulate innovation that can lead to new products and greater market share. The impetus can come from the top, because when executives set rigorous goals and metrics for measuring them, they unleash innovation throughout the company. GE’s Ecomagination program, which generated $18 billion in revenue on $1.5 billion in investments, is a good example of this approach. Innovation can also come from the bottom up, as illustrated by Toyota’s ” Treasure Hunt ” process, which uses operators, engineers and maintenance staff to find process innovations and energy savings. And innovation can come from the outside. Breakthrough ideas can — and often do — emerge from bringing a new and diverse perspective to a familiar problem. Environmental Defense Fund recently teamed up with InnoCentive , a global leader in crowdsourced innovation, to work with companies to create business breakthroughs that deliver environmental results. InnoCentive’s web-based platform gives over 250,000 entrepreneurs, inventors and scientists around the world the chance to solve them. With the likes of Eli Lilly, NASA, and Procter & Gamble using the platform, it’s redefining the innovation process. Capture operational excellence For most companies, including those that provide business capital, environmental issues are still thought of as a liability rather than an opportunity. To build value, firms must think beyond compliance. Smart companies are positioning themselves to compete in a resource-constrained world, where efficiency and innovation trump risk management. Working with private equity giants The Carlyle Group and Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Co. , EDF has developed tools that are available to any company for systematically identifying opportunity and measuring improvements in environmental and business performance. In just two years, those tools generated $160 million in operating savings for companies including Dollar General and US Foodservice. Drive supply chain improvement Companies will want to focus first on their own operations, but for many small and medium-sized businesses, their biggest impacts lie not within their own fencelines, but in the lifecycle of the products they buy and sell. And while smaller companies may not feel that they have the clout to create supply chain mandates, they do have ability to ask pointed questions and shop around for the best prices. Why should your company be paying for the extra energy or water or wasted raw materials embedded in products made by another company that has not yet embraced sustainability? There are several good examples to work from. Walmart’s Supplier Sustainability Assessment questions are simple, straight-forward and a good place to start. Procter & Gamble has a similar supplier scorecard designed to track and encourage improvement on key environmental sustainability measures in P&G’s supply chain. The company reports that about 40 percent of the completed scorecards it receives have offered at least one innovation idea. Today, we are all feeling the stress of a pinched economy, resource constraints, volatile fuel prices and global competition. At the same time, we’re seeing examples every day of companies that have successfully turned environmental sustainability into competitive advantage. By building capturing energy and operational efficiencies, stimulating innovation through aggressive goals and creative networking, and driving lifecycle change through the supply chain, we can bring Porter’s big idea to life. This content was originally published on Green to Gold’s BRASS TACKS blog .

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Dave Johnson: What "Free Trade" Has Cost The World

March 21, 2011

If you take a job away from someone who is paid a reasonable wage because they enjoy the protections and prosperity of democratic government, move it across a border, and give it to someone living under a thugocracy, forced to work for pennies with no protections whatsoever, it should be just plain obvious that the worker on our side of the border and the worker on the other side of the border are not going to be better off. And when you do this on a massive scale it just stands to reason that most people on both sides of the border are going to be worse off. But propaganda being what it is we were somehow convinced to try a worldwide experiment in taking good jobs from democracies and turning them into bad jobs in thugocracies. Now, of course, the experiment has run its course and we can see the results. Worker Against Worker Setting worker against worker enabled a few people to get really, really really wealthy and powerful and use that wealth to become even more wealthy and powerful. Our country is in decline, burdened by massive trade deficits because the ones with vested interests in cheap labor won’t let us won’t take on the mercantilists, burdened by budget deficits because those vested interests have bought low taxes and government subsidies, our infrastructure crumbles because multinational business leaders refuse to invest here, with no more need of us as workers, and the resulting hollowed-out middle class can’t consume anymore. Other countries also suffer from similar stresses. Out of this situation a new global elite has emerged, contemptuous of democracy and government and any power but the power of their own money. In country after country, these top few won’t share the proceeds with their own, either, while they keep the world from approaching solutions. In January’s post, Establishment Realizing: When You Close The Factory We Can’t Make A Living , I wrote about how “the establishment,” or as bloggers call it, “The Village” or “Versailles,” are starting to realize that our trade policies just might not be working for us. Of course, they come to this realization only after our trade deficits approach the trillion mark, after we have lost millions of manufacturing jobs, after we have closed tens of thousands of factories, after we have lost the tech manufacturing industry, and after we have abandoned hopes of leading in green manufacturing as well… (We’re still waiting for them to realize that tax cuts do not increase revenue, that spending more on military than all other countries combined might contribute to deficits, that our too-big-to-fail financial sector is capable of causing problems, that the climate really is changing, that allowing corporations to pump money into politics means the end of democracy… but hey, a dollar spent by a vested interest on a politician apparently is a dollar very, very well spent.) In the Washington Post, Steven Pearlstein recently reviewed Dani Rodrik’s “The Globalization Paradox ,” It is dogma among economists and right-thinking members of the political and business elite that globalization is good and more of it is even better. That is why they invariably view anyone who dissents from this orthodoxy as either ignorant of the logic of comparative advantage or selfishly protectionist. But what if it turns out that globalization is more of a boon to the members of the global elite than it is to the average Jose? Right, what if? In “The Globalization Paradox,” Dani Rodrik demonstrates that those questions are more than hypothetical — that they describe the world as it really is rather than as it exists in economic theory or in the imagination of free trade fundamentalists. . . . The starting point of Rodrik’s argument is that open markets succeed only when embedded within social, legal and political institutions that provide them legitimacy by ensuring that the benefits of capitalism are broadly shared. And a unicorn. And a rainbow. The paradox, as Rodrik sees it, is that globalization will work for everyone only if all countries abide by the same set of rules, hammered out and enforced by some form of technocratic global government. The reality is, however, that most countries are unwilling to give up their sovereignty, their distinctive institutions and their freedom to manage their economies in their own best interests. Not China. Not India. Not the members of the European Union, as they are now discovering. Not even the United States. In the real world, argues Rodrik, there is a fundamental incompatibility between hyper-globalization on the one hand, and democracy and national sovereignty on the other. Clyde Prestowitz threw a one-two punch at free trade after Senator John McCain claimed that the iPhone and iPad are Made in America. In Why isn’t the iPhone made in America? at Foreign Policy magazine, Prestowitz wrote, John McCain provided some good laughs and made himself look stupid on a recent ABC news interview by telling Diane Sawyer that the iPhone and iPad are great examples of products that are made in America. They’re not. And given the amount of high technology production in his state, McCain should certainly have known better. The fact that he didn’t does make you wonder about what, if anything, they know in the U.S. Senate. Prestowitz goes on to explain that while the iPhone is manufactured in China, parts, software, design and other components are made all around the world, not necessarily for low wages. He concludes, So if America actually did produce the stuff it says it is good at producing, it wouldn’t have a trade deficit with Asia for which China is the proxy at all. It would have a trade surplus and 20-40,000 more jobs than it has. Prestowitz looks at a smaller picture here of the back-and-forth of trade with the US and China. Design, software and other capital and technology intensive components are not made in China. But the bulk of the jobs are in China. This could work for everyone if people there were paid enough — and allowed by their government — to buy things made here. That would be trade and everyone would be better off. But trade isn’t really the point of “free trade.” Then, in It’s not just the iPhone that America doesn’t make , Prestowitz conitinues, Okay, so yesterday I explained not only that John McCain was wrong to say the iPhone is made in America (as you already knew), but also that most of you were wrong to think it is made in China. I went on to show that the phone is only assembled in China from high-tech parts that are mostly made in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. I further explained that production of these parts is not labor intensive, but capital and technology intensive. In other words, these parts are just the kinds of products American economists, Silicon Valley venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, and Washington political leaders always say America is the best in the world at making. … Then I left you with the question of why, if America is so good at making this stuff, it doesn’t. [. . .] it was believed that unilateral free trade (keeping one’s markets open, even in the face of protectionism by one’s trading partners) was a winning proposition. Thus, there was no need to be concerned about things like subsidization of key foreign industries or loss of capability in these fields, and hence no need for trade measures that might upset delicate geopolitical relationships. This economic doctrine has been based upon the assumption of Anglo/American economics that economies of scale either don’t exist in most traded products and industries or are relatively unimportant. That this assumption is dramatically and demonstrably wrong and not accepted by most of the non-Anglo world has not deterred its application to the making of much American and global trade policy. In other words, it doesn’t work. But we already knew that. We can see it all around us. And it is us who have to live with the results. This post originally appeared at Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture . I am a Fellow with CAF. Sign up here for the CAF daily summary .

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Rob Johnson: Who Is Influencing Obama’s Budget Proposal? Follow the Funders

February 15, 2011

Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0 . President Obama is a smart man. When Gallup surveys suggest that unemployment is around 10 percent — and that unemployment plus underemployment is 19 percent of the workforce — then it’s clear that the best way to raise revenues and close the deficit is to put people back to work. President Obama surely knows this. But his actions don’t seem to follow this obvious logic. Why is that? Part of the reason lies in a group of people who pour money into our political system but don’t necessarily want the same things that ordinary Americans want. In fact, these people benefit from municipal crises, breaking teachers unions, and increasing the fear of the workforce. They fall disproportionately into the group that Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig identified as “the funders” in his recent TedX Talk in San Antonio, Texas. The increasing power of this group produces political contortions by buying results in Congress that do nothing for regular folks. Their influence also steers President Obama to focus on his reelection rather than trying to change the climate of opinion and become America’s Great Persuader. The public has now heard the conservative mantra that government is the problem and not the solution for 40 years. Couple that with the experience of valid rage following the bank bailouts, and it’s not surprising that the public overwhelmingly feels that the government has become an instrument of the wealthy and powerful. Strong leadership is needed to challenge this narrative. But the President seems content to conform to the prevailing suspicion of government. He fails to convince the public that the government can have an active response to the jobs crisis that benefits them. And that suits many funders in the top 3 percent of the wealth distribution just fine. With profits so high and so many slack resources, it is sad that President Obama continues on the path of “triangulation” and chooses to “pre-concede” so much to the Republicans. In electoral terms, the breaking of all of the unions at the state and local level will serve to benefit the Republican party in many regions and exacerbate inequality. It is surprising the the President does not resist this for the benefit of his own party’s future. But Presidents often fly solo rather than represent their party when reelection looms — especially in a post- Citizens United world that will be influenced by unprecedented rivers of money. Looking forward, we can see that our infrastructure is worn out in many, many places. We can also see that a dearth of public goods, education, basic science and infrastructure portend a weakening of the living standard of our nation. President Obama seemed to acknowledge this in his State of the Union address vision. But his budget strategy does not. The current budgets, both Democrat and Republican, appear to be imposing cuts on the lower middle class and poor. We are, as Paul Krugman said in The New York Times on Monday , are eating our future. Unfortunately, the proposed budget appears more likely to contribute to the ongoing widening of wealth and income inequality. And it seems more likely to increase, rather than reduce, the idle resources in our society. This budget logic makes little sense, and the human costs are dreadful. Only the logic of power sheds light on our path of dysfunction in the USA. Andrew Mellon must be smiling.

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Kelly Rigg: Your Tax Dollars at Work: Helping BP and Exxon Kill Clean Energy

February 9, 2011

President Obama’s call for a reduction in fossil fuel subsidies elicited predictable cries of outrage from the American Petroleum Institute and others who have a vested financial interest in feeding our addiction to fossil fuels. Let’s be clear, this addiction is killing us just as surely as tobacco causes cancer. And like the tobacco industry in decades past, the fossil fuel industry hopes you won’t notice until it’s too late. The current debate about energy subsidies brings to mind Catch-22 , Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel about World War II, and the challenge of living in an inescapable conundrum: …Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. Being concerned about the real and immediate dangers of climate change should most certainly qualify you as “sane.” CO2 and other greenhouse gases are warming the atmosphere, and the burning of fossil fuels is the primary source of increased CO2 in the atmosphere. It stands to reason we should be phasing out the use of fossil fuels. Not to mention the fact that our tax dollars are actually going to companies like ExxonMobil and BP to help keep the prices of oil, gas and coal artificially low. Sounds like “big government” to me. I wonder why the Tea Party isn’t shouting from the rooftops about that one. Here’s the energy Catch-22, and it’s just as warped and confusing as Joseph Heller’s version: Fossil fuels cause massive impacts on the environment and human health which leads to higher taxes and health care costs. Fossil fuels (and nuclear power for that matter) are artificially cheap because they enjoy billions of dollars of government subsidies, which also leads to higher taxes. Renewable energy receives a fraction of that amount in subsidies , and is creating new jobs which generate government income without having to raise taxes. The fossil fuel industry is employing fewer people as a result of technological advances ( PDF ), which means less government income and therefore higher taxes. Cheap fossil fuels reduce incentives to use energy more efficiently, which makes businesses less competitive, which in turn costs jobs, which costs taxpayers money. Fossil fuel lobbyists argue that renewables are too costly to compete with other energy sources. Catch-22, 1970 It is highly doubtful that Yossarian would have whistled respectfully about the Catch-22 of energy subsidies. It doesn’t take a genius to see that phasing out the subsidized use of fossil fuels is a no-brainer for economic reasons, let alone all of the other benefits it would have. And if some of the money going to the energy giants is used to alleviate the burden on the poorest people, it would create a win/win situation for everyone (well, almost everyone). President Obama is not the only leader calling for change. G20 leaders meeting in Pittsburgh in 2009 agreed: To phase out and rationalize over the medium term inefficient fossil fuel subsidies while providing targeted support for the poorest. Inefficient fossil fuel subsidies encourage wasteful consumption, reduce our energy security, impede investment in clean energy sources and undermine efforts to deal with the threat of climate change. Unfortunately, the G20 leaders still have a way to go before they fulfil this promise. Oil Change International recently conducted a review of G20 action to phase out fossil fuel subsidies. “The bottom line” according to the organization’s Director Steve Kretzmann, “is that no subsidies have been removed as a result of the G20 commitment.” The US has the opportunity to be the hero of this story, by leading the world in breaking the Catch-22 of fossil fuel subsidies. And if there’s one thing the climate needs right now it’s heroes. If nothing else, won’t you feel better knowing that your hard-earned money is not helping fuel the obscene profits of these corporate giants? How do we send a message that it’s time to end Big Oil and other fossil fuel subsidies so Clean Energy solutions can have a fighting chance?

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The Next Generation Of Wikileaks

January 28, 2011

BERLIN (By Mark Hosenball) – All across Europe, from Brussels to the Balkans, a new generation of WikiLeaks-style websites is sprouting. Like their forerunner, the fledgling whistle-blowing sites are a chaotic mixture of complex systems engineering, earnest campaigning, muckraking and self-promotion. And though their goals are varied, the activists behind the sites told Reuters that they share one major concern: they all vow not to repeat mistakes they believe were made by Julian Assange, the controversial WikiLeaks creator. The proliferation of websites to encourage, facilitate and shelter leakers is so anarchic that two aspiring anti-corporate leak sites are both claiming rights to the rubric “GreenLeaks” and muttering about legal consequences if the other side doesn’t back down. The most closely watched rollout in the leak-hosting world was the launch on Thursday of OpenLeaks.org, a site whose principal creator, German transparency activist Daniel Domscheit-Berg, was once Assange’s closest collaborator. Domscheit-Berg, who used the pseudonym “Daniel Schmitt” as Assange’s official WikiLeaks co-spokesman, says he doesn’t believe, as Assange initially did, that confidential material should just be dumped on the Internet. The bare-bones mission statement posted on OpenLeaks describes Domscheit-Berg’s vision as both a safe-deposit box and a social networking site for leakers and their consumers. Other WikiLeaks copycats, spinoffs and wannabes are germinating: activists say they have learned of recent launches of leak-accepting websites focused on specialized topics or regions — from Russia and the European Union bureaucracy to international trade and the pharmaceutical industry. Major news organizations are also moving to establish web-based mechanisms for receiving leaks directly, such as electronic “drop boxes” which would enable leakers to feed the media outlets directly, cutting out middlemen like Assange. “THE ARCHITECT” The most ambitious and potentially far-reaching WikiLeaks spinoff to surface this week is Domscheit-Berg’s OpenLeaks, which its founder describes as a mechanism both for putting together leakers with knowledgeable recipients and for linking leak-consuming organizations to each other. The burgeoning Wikiworld has been eagerly anticipating Domscheit-Berg’s next project since his falling out with Assange last year. The two became estranged following an e-mail exchange in which Assange summarily suspended Domscheit-Berg as WikiLeaks co-spokesman for allegedly leaking information to the media about growing concern among other WikiLeaks activists about Assange’s private life. Domscheit-Berg subsequently quit WikiLeaks, denouncing Assange for “acting like an emperor or slave trader.” He took with him other more shadowy figures who had been important collaborators with Assange in creating key elements of WikiLeaks’ leak-handling systems architecture. One of the defectors was a programer known to most insiders simply as “The Architect.” Described by colleagues as at least as brilliant at programing as Assange, The Architect was the principal designer of the systems WikiLeaks used to produce Assange’s greatest public triumphs last year, the distribution of hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government reports. In a conversation with Reuters on Thursday from Davos, Switzerland, where he appeared on a World Economic Forum panel devoted to “Confidentiality and Transparency,” Domscheit-Berg said his WikiLeaks experience had convinced him of the wrongness of Assange’s view that the website should publish raw information and let others sort through it. (Assange’s approach subsequently appears to have matured, as demonstrated by WikiLeaks current snail-like release of its cache of 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables.) Domscheit-Berg said WikiLeaks taught him that huge efforts have to be made to authenticate, analyze, filter and if necessary redact leaked secret documents before making them public. He said that WikiLeaks also demonstrated that a top-down group like WikiLeaks, which Assange by his own account rules like something of an absolute monarch, might not be the best model to undertake painstaking pre-publication reviews of complex, and potentially damaging, data. He said his concept is to create a new network through which leakers of any kind — government, corporate, environmental, whatever — could make confidential submissions to groups that could make use of them. OpenLeaks itself would not evaluate, let alone publicly release, the information. Instead it would convey it from leaker to leakee. The plan is to create a central web architecture for moving confidential documents from leaker to recipients, and then recruit organizations from the media, NGO world and labor movement, to become partners in the network he is creating. With his system — which is still being put together, and which, according to some activist sources, has had to postpone its launch date more than once — would-be leakers could anonymously approach OpenLeaks to be connected with a group of OpenLeaks partners who would have the resources and expertise to process their data properly, or with a single leak recipient. Leakers wanting to connect with a single recipient, such as a specific media outlet, would be able to. But Domscheit-Berg says that in most cases OpenLeaks’ practice would be that the individual media organization receiving a leak would have only a limited embargo period, usually a few weeks, to analyze the material and decide how or whether to use it. After that, the leaked material would be shared with all partners in the OpenLeaks project. Domscheit-Berg says this system is designed both to provide leaks exposure to a wider circle of potential expertise and publicity and also to encourage partners to share more information among themselves. “We’re trying to be a gatekeeper but actually enabling everyone else,” Domscheit-Berg said. If a leaker wanted the material never to be shared beyond a single initial recipient, he said, that could be arranged. Domscheit-Berg said that at some point he hoped to establish a foundation to help raise funds for not just OpenLeaks operations but also research legal and political issues related to transparency and disclosure. He said none of the partners joining the OpenLeaks network would be asked to make any direct financial contribution, and that OpenLeaks would not generate revenue by brokering information. Instead, he said, OpenLeaks will suggest that potential partners with large servers contribute computer time or space to help build the network. Some internet activists and journalists who heard details of Domscheit-Berg’s scheme before its official launch are already raising questions. They wonder whether the plan is too complicated and how the system will fulfill promises to leakers that their material will only be shared with limited recipients if that’s what the leaker wants. Domscheit-Berg said that leakers and partners would have to operate on a measure of “trust.” He declined to discuss the role “The Architect” or other activists would play in crafting OpenLeaks’ technical infrastructure, other than to acknowledge that some of his new site’s “technical people … were with WikiLeaks.” “COUNTERINTELLIGENCE FOR THE EARTH” Of more immediate interest to oil, mining and other natural resources industries might be the launch of two websites which say they intend to become conduits for corporate insiders wanting to blow the whistle on environmental abuses. But the race to set up environmentally-oriented websites under the rubric “GreenLeaks” became slightly toxic earlier this week when groups of activists in Denmark and Germany, who say they have been working independently for months on creating infrastructures in cyberspace and assembling networks of lawyers and experts to process leaks, learned of each others’ existence. The rival groups were not pleased to discover they had become involved in a competition. Representatives of both groups say they are willing to discuss their visions with each other. But each side is also assessing possible legal moves. The leader of one of the groups told Reuters that his lawyers may file legal papers challenging his rivals’ activities before the end of this week. The creators of both “GreenLeaks” websites each say they came up with the idea independently and have already expended considerable energy working on both legal and technical aspects of their sites. As the rival sites’ founders describe them, each site has its own quirks and merits, which in theory could complement each other. But for now, the two sites are glowering at each other, hoping their antagonist will blink first. A group based in Denmark has registered the Internet domain name “GreenLeaks.org” and said it has applied to trademark it as well. Based in Copenhagen, the group is led by Internet advertising executive Mads Bjerg and backed by his boss Jacob Hagemann, head of Searcus, a Copenhagen ad agency that specializes in crafting ads linked to internet searches. Bjerg’s project has been endorsed by Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of Parliament in Iceland who was once a close collaborator with WikiLeaks and Assange. (After Swedish authorities opened a sexual misconduct investigation against him, Jonsdottir fell out with Assange and denounced him.) Bjerg has also been in contact with OpenLeaks via one of Domscheit-Berg’s collaborators, an Icelandic former WikiLeaks volunteer named Herbert Snorrason who uses the OpenLeaks handle “Odin”. In two days of interviews with Reuters at restaurants, lawyers’ offices and the houseboat where he lives, Bjerg said he had recruited a group of prominent Danish lawyers, journalists and activists to help him build GreenLeaks. He said he already had an idea about landing a big leak — though he wouldn’t say what it was — and said that other supporters of his project included an unidentified former official of a European intelligence service, who would help his site with security issues. Bjerg said that on January 17 he launched a homepage with a “GreenLeaks.org” logo (and little, if anything, else) and added: “Money is not an obstacle right now.” He declined to identify how much financial support his site had or where it came from. He said at the moment volunteers were offering help. His ambition for the site is expansive. “We want to be the authority when it comes to leaks about nature, the climate and the environment … The voice of the Earth … Counterintelligence agency for the Earth, you could say.” Bjerg said journalists and activist groups — including the Nordic branch of Greenpeace — have already pledged support to GreenLeaks.org. DanWatch, a non-profit investigative journalism group which gets funding from both the Danish Government and the European Union, has also affiliated itself with Bjerg’s website. Anne Skjerning, DanWatch’s director, said that her group, which specializes in corporate exposes, had “a hard time getting information on companies because it’s confidential.” She said that a GreenLeaks website “would be a big help for us” as a conduit through which anonymous leakers could supply inside information. Bjerg said that Thorkild Hoyer, a prominent Copenhagen lawyer who specializes in human rights, has agreed to serve as one of the group’s spokespeople. But responsibility will be shared among activists and supporters, and there will be no cults of personality. “We do not want this organization to be led by one person,” Bjerg said. “As we saw with WikiLeaks, certain things can work against an organization if the initial financier is also the early programer and chief editor.” The competitor to Bjerg’s GreenLeaks.org is being put together by Scott Millwood, an Australian documentary film-maker based in Germany. Over lunch in a Berlin sushi bar, Millwood told Reuters his group acquired the domain name GreenLeaks in 36 countries where it also has registered GreenLeaks internet addresses under the “.com” and “.biz” designators. Millwood said he also has applied to the European Union to register “GreenLeaks” as a trademark, but recently learned that Bjerg’s Denmark-based group had made a similar move within days of Millwood making his own application. Millwood acknowledged that there was “one inactive domain name that we don’t own” — Bjerg’s URL, “GreenLeaks.org.” By the same token he said, one of the URLs Millwood says he registered himself is “GreenLeaks.dk” — a domain name specifically related to Denmark. Millwood acknowledged the rivalry between the two groups could escalate into a “legal dispute.” His GreenLeaks.com will be organizationally similar to the original WikiLeaks — in that Millwood will be chief editor and principal spokesman. “I’m the public face and the editor. It’s important our organization has a responsible editor. We’re a news organization with a responsible editor. We’re not clandestine. We won’t be faceless or placeless.” Millwood nonetheless did not identify other collaborators in his website, other than to say that they included people located in several countries with backgrounds in environmental activism, information technology, social media and the law. He said that despite his plan to be his website’s public face, his philosophy of handling leaks is markedly different from the one pursued by WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. “He believed that he had a duty to history to put everything in the public sphere; information for its own sake,” Millwood said. “That’s not our philosophy. If we release information we want it to have a specific purpose.” To this end, Millwood, who produced documentaries about alleged environmental abuse in his native Tasmania, says that one of his main objectives will be to take leaked information and popularize it — for example through reporting out stories or crafting graphics. Like his rival GreenLeaks and OpenLeaks, Millwood talks of enlisting partners or eventually setting up a network of regional GreenLeaks sites. For the moment, however, Millwood’s Greenleaks.com site, which he managed to launch a few days before his Danish rivals “.org” site went live, is skeletal. He acknowledged he is “still developing the infrastructure” for a site which can receive and process confidential leaks. “EZ-PASS FOR LEAKERS” At least one other website channeling purported insider disclosures on green issues, called EnviroLeaks.org, is also up and running, though much of its initial fare consisted of re-posting State Department cables already released by WikiLeaks. More original — and arcane — are recent launches such as balkanLeaks.eu and brusselsleaks.com, which deal, respectively, with scandals in countries like Bulgaria and in the European Union bureaucracy. (BalkanLeaks’ content appears to be mainly a one-page manifesto.) Meanwhile, one prominent media outlet which has had a productive, though tempestuous relationship with Assange and the original WikiLeaks, is brainstorming whether it might be possible to cut out the middleman entirely and establish a secure channel for leakers to feed stuff to it directly. The New York Times, which is publishing an e-book on its dealings with WikiLeaks and also has posted a lengthy account by Executive Editor Bill Keller of his turbulent dealings with Assange, is examining whether it could set up its own Internet conduit for secure leaking. “Yes, a few people in our computer-assisted reporting and interactive news units are looking at setting up a drop box of some kind,” Keller told Reuters in an e-mail. “I’ve taken to calling it an EZ Pass lane for whistleblowers.” Keller noted that there are “some technical, legal and journalistic issues to work through” and added: “Nothing decided yet, but I’m intrigued.” (Editing by Jim Impoco and Claudia Parsons) Copyright 2010 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions .

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Marc Stoiber: Green B2B: The Secret Sauce For Better Employees?

January 24, 2011

Sustainability is very much a headline in B2C. But we don’t hear much on the subject in B2B. Is it happening? What are the motivators for B2B businesses going green? And what are the consequences of ‘wait and see’? This article is the second in a three part series exploring B2B sustainability issues, culminating in a webinar Tuesday, February 8, 1pm EST (10am PST). To add the webinar to your Outlook calendar, click here . Sometimes, a clever opener is the best way to draw readers. And other times, well, you just let the facts speak for themselves: • Mail sorters at the main US Post Office in Reno, Nevada became the most productive and error-free in the western US after a ‘green’ energy and lighting upgrade in their building. The $300,000 upgrade produced $50,000 in yearly energy and maintenance savings…and a whopping $400,000 annual productivity gain from employees . • VeriFone, a subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard that makes electronic swipe readers to verify credit cards, renovated their building, beating California’s strict Title 24 building code by 60 percent with a 7.5-year payback. More astonishing, however, was the five percent increase in employee productivity and 45 percent drop in absenteeism after the overhaul. These benefits brought payback to under a year, for a return on investment of more than 100 percent. • The Superior Die Set Corporation of Oak Creek, Wisconsin upgraded lighting for $3,000, providing annual energy and maintenance savings of $1,750 – a payback of 20 months. But reduced reflections allowed drafters to cut turn-around time for drawings by more than 11.3 percent , worth $37,500 a year, reducing the payback to under one month. These cases have two things in common. First, each company greened their operations to raise operational efficiency and comply with legislation. And second, each company was taken by surprise when a side benefit – happy employees – seemed to produce unexpected returns. The Best Employees Want Green A recent poll on MonsterTRAK.com found that 80% of young professionals are interested in securing a job that has positive impact on the environment, and 92% would be more inclined to work for a company that is environmentally friendly. How do they find those jobs? One way is through the Environmental Defense Fund’s unique Climate Corps . EDF Climate Corps places specially-trained students from leading business schools in companies to develop energy efficiency plans. One glance at Climate Corps’ website reveals the top caliber talent attracted to the program – and the incredible benefits to partner companies. But are employees picking green companies in meaningful numbers? Anecdotal evidence would suggest so. On a recent visit to Patagonia HQ in Ventura, CA I learned that for each job opening posted, the company receives thousands of qualified applicants. It’s no surprise the company defied the recession, and continues to grow at a healthy pace. Attracting talent is only part of the equation. Andy Mercy is CEO of Angelpoints , a company that helps clients build more effective corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs. In a recent conversation, Mercy said employee CSR programs create benefits far beyond lessening the company’s ecological footprint. In one of the companies serviced by Angelpoints: • Galvanizing employees around CSR produced one of the most positive aspects of job satisfaction 75% of the time; • 49% of employees reported they learned valuable new job skills through the CSR activities; • 64% of the CSR activities resulted in new business leads, when employees were teamed with clients or suppliers in joint programs. Creating a happier, healthier workplace seems an obvious way to boost productivity and attract the best workers. Sadly, this fact is lost on the majority of B2B CEO’s. What Are You Missing? Ian Sugarbroad, former CEO of LGC Wireless, built his B2B company in the hypercompetitive environment of Silicon Valley. In a phone conversation, Sugarbroad credited his corporate green programs with maintaining a stable, highly motivated workforce. And he can’t believe green hasn’t become par for the course among B2B CEO’s. “It definitely hasn’t become standard procedure in Silicon Valley. I believe only 30% of CEO’s think about CSR. 20% just go with the flow, adopting the same green behavior as their competitors. And 50% don’t get it at all – they think building a great company is still as simple as building a great product.” Fact is, an alarmingly high number of B2B companies aren’t up to speed on green issues that could seriously impact their business. According to Scott Wilson of IHS , a recent study conducted by his firm revealed that 45% of B2B’s were unaware of ‘conflict mineral’ legislation enacted in July 2010 – legislation that could cripple electronics suppliers. How does your company stack up? Are you at risk of losing employees, as well as being penalized by legislation or customers greening their supply chain? Learn. Adapt. And Communicate. There are three major lessons to be learned. First, stay informed. This is easier said than done, as information flow has become a torrent. But it’s vital that someone in your company tracks both customer trends and legislation. Second, use the information to adapt to your environment. This adaptation needs to be strategic – choose your areas of green focus with an eye on the white space you could claim. And finally, communicate and engage your employees. Ensure they know what you’re doing in green. Even better, engage them to shape the green course of your company.

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Rebecca Solnit: Iceberg Economies and Shadow Selves: Further Adventures in the Territories of Hope

December 22, 2010

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com . After the Macondo well exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, it was easy enough (on your choice of screen) to see a flaming oil platform, the very sea itself set afire with huge plumes of black smoke rising, and the dark smear of what would become five million barrels of oil beginning to soak birds and beaches. Infinitely harder to see and less dramatic was the vast counterforce soon at work: the mobilizing of tens of thousands of volunteers, including passionate locals from fishermen in the Louisiana Oystermen’s Association to an outraged tattoo-artist-turned-organizer, from visiting scientists, activist groups, and Catholic Charities reaching out to Vietnamese fishing families to the journalist and oil-policy expert Antonia Juhasz, and Rosina Philippe of the Atakapa-Ishak tribe in Grand Bayou.

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UN Climate Deal Marks A Tiny Step Forward For Fighting Climate Change

December 11, 2010

CANCUN, Mexico — A U.N. conference on Saturday adopted a modest climate deal creating a fund to help the developing world go green, though it deferred for another year the tough work of carving out deeper reductions in carbon emissions causing Earth to steadily warm. Though the accords were limited, it was the first time in three years the 193-nation conference adopted any climate action, restoring faith in the unwieldy U.N. process after the letdown a year ago at a much-anticipated summit in Copenhagen. The Cancun Agreements created institutions for delivering technology and funding to poorer countries, though they did not say where the funding would come from. In urging industrial countries to move faster on emissions cuts, it noted that scientists recommended reducing greenhouse gas emissions from industrial countries by 25 to 40 per cent from 1990 levels within the next 10 years. Current pledges amount to about 16 percent. Mexican President Felipe Calderon, in a 4 a.m. speech, declared the conference “a thoroughgoing success,” after two separate agreements were passed. The agreements shattered “the inertia of mistrust” that had settled over the frustrated efforts for a broad climate treaty, he said. One of the agreements renewed a framework for cutting greenhouse gas emissions but set no new targets for industrial countries. The second created a financial and technical support system for developing countries facing grave threats from global warming. Foreign Secretary Patricia Espinosa, the conference president, gaveled the deal through early Saturday over the objections of Bolivia’s delegate, who said it was so weak it would endanger the planet. Decisions at the U.N. climate talks are typically made by consensus, but Espinosa said consensus doesn’t “mean that one country has the right to veto” decisions supported by everyone else. The accord establishes a multibillion dollar annual Green Climate Fund to help developing countries cope with climate change, though it doesn’t say how the fund’s money is to be raised. Last year in Copenhagen governments agreed to mobilize $100 billion a year for developing countries, starting in 2020, much of which will be handled by the fund. The agreements also set rules for internationally funded forest conservation, and provides for climate-friendly technology to expanding economies. Espinosa won repeated standing ovations from a packed conference hall for her deft handling of bickering countries and for drafting an acceptable deal, though it fully satisfied no one. “It’s been a challenging, tiring and intensive week” said U.S. special climate envoy Todd Stern, clearly content with the results. The European Union’s top climate official, Connie Hedegaard, said Saturday’s decisions would help keep international climate talks on track. “But the two weeks in Cancun have shown once again how slow and difficult the process is,” Hedegaard said. “Everyone needs to be aware that we still have a long and challenging journey ahead of us to reach the goal of a legally binding global climate framework.” Christiana Figueres, the U.N.’s senior climate official, said the agreements would put all governments on cleaner trajectory. “Cancun has done its job,” she said. Environmentalists cautiously welcomed the deal. It “wasn’t enough to save the climate,” said Alden Meyer of the Washington-based Union of Concerned Scientists. “But it did restore the credibility of the United Nations as a forum where progress can be made.” The Cancun deal finessed disputes between industrial and developing countries on future emissions cuts and incorporates voluntary reduction pledges attached to the Copenhagen Accord that emerged from last year’s climate summit in the Danish capital. It struck a skillful compromise between the U.S. and China, which had been at loggerheads throughout the two week conclave on methods for monitoring and verifying actions to curtail greenhouse gases. “What we have now is a text that, while not perfect, is certainly a good basis for moving forward,” Stern said during the decisive conference meeting. His Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, sounded a similar note and added, “The negotiations in the future will continue to be difficult.” The accord “goes beyond what we expected when we came here,” said Wendel Trio of the Greenpeace environmental group. Underscoring what’s at stake in the long-running climate talks, NASA reported that the January-November 2010 global temperatures were the warmest in the 131-year record. Its data indicated the year would likely end as the warmest on record, or tied with 2005 as the warmest. The U.N.’s top climate science body has said swift and deep reductions are required to keep temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.8 F) above preindustrial levels, which could trigger catastrophic climate impacts. Bolivian delegate Pablo Solon protested that the weak pledges of the Copenhagen Accord condemned the Earth to temperature increases of up to 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 F), saying that is tantamount to “ecocide” that could cost millions of lives. He also complained that the text was being railroaded over his protests in violation of the U.N.’s consensus rules. In the 1992 U.N. climate treaty, the world’s nations promised to do their best to rein in carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases emitted by industry, transportation and agriculture. In the two decades since, the annual conferences’ only big advance came in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, when parties agreed on modest mandatory reductions by richer nations. But the U.S., alone in the industrial world, rejected the Kyoto Protocol, complaining it would hurt its economy and that such emerging economies as China and India should have taken on emissions obligations. Since then China has replaced the U.S. as the world’s biggest emitter, but it has resisted calls that it assume legally binding commitments – not to lower its emissions, but to restrain their growth. Here at Cancun such issues came to a head, as Japan and Russia fought pressure to acknowledge in a final decision that they will commit to a second period of emissions reductions under Kyoto, whose current targets expire in 2012. The Japanese complained that with the rise of China, India, Brazil and others, the 37 Kyoto industrial nations now account for only 27 percent of global greenhouse emissions. They want a new, legally binding pact obligating the U.S., China and other major emitters.

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Robert Reich: Halliburton and the Upcoming Election

October 29, 2010

Next Tuesday Americans will be deciding whether to hand over even more of our government to corporations that have been plundering America — such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Wellpoint insurance, Massey Energy, and Halliburton, the giant oil services company. Not every large corporation is irresponsible, of course, but plunderers that get away with it gain a competitive advantage over the more responsible, and thereby lead a race to the bottom. Case in point: The staff of the presidential commission investigating the BP oil spill has just revealed that Halliburton executives knew the cement it was using to seal BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil well was likely to be unstable but didn’t tell BP or act on the information. In a letter to the commission’s seven members, the staff found that the failure of the cement was a key factor in the blowout that caused millions of barrels of crude oil to escape into the Gulf of Mexico. (Not the sole factor, of course; most of the blame for the disaster, says the staff, still rests with BP and Transocean, the company BP hired to drill the well.) Halliburton has not exactly sat out this election. Last May, as Congress began investigating its role in the disaster, its political action committee made 14 contributions — 13 to Republicans and one to a Democrat. Many were involved in the investigation; others had responsibility for overseeing oil drilling in the Gulf. It was the biggest donation month for Halliburton’s PAC since September 2008. Halliburton, in case you’ve forgotten, is not exactly a model citizen. It has evaded U.S. taxes and export bans through foreign subsidiaries; admitted to bribing foreign officials (a subsidiary paid $2.4 million to a Nigerian government official in exchange for favorable tax treatment); conceded in an internal memo (leaked to the Wall Street Journal ) its cost controls for government contracts in Iraq were “antiquated” and its procurement “disorganized; was found by Pentagon auditors to have overcharged estimated at $27.4 million for meals served to American troops at five military bases in Iraq and Kuwait (in one camp billing for an average 42,000 meals a day but serving only 14,000). The list of Halliburton’s crimes goes on and on. And yet, somehow, Halliburton goes on piling up profits. How? Because of its deep connections to Washington. Dick Cheney hadn’t had any experience in the oil business when he became Halliburton’s CEO in 1995. But he did have experience in government — as George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense. And those military ties were invaluable to the company. Under his reign, Halliburton rose from 73rd to 18th on the Pentagon’s list of top contractors, and the money garnered from government-sponsored agencies (such as the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the Export-Import Bank) soared from $100 million in the five years prior to Cheney’s arrival to $1.5 billion a few years after. As vice president to George W. Bush, Cheney made sure Halliburton’s stunning performance would continue (Cheney continued to receive checks from the company). According to congressional inquiries, Cheney’s vice presidential office was instrumental in forcing the Environmental Protection Agency to remove sections on climate change from reports in 2002 and 2003 (a process Christine Todd Whitman, then the E.P.A. administrator, subsequently described as “brutal.”) The Bush-Cheney administration also sought to control or censor congressional testimony about climate change by federal employees, and tampered with other reports in order to inject uncertainty into the climate debate. Which brings us back to the Deepwater Horizon blowout. Halliburton’s executives knew the cement it used to seal the well was filled with mud — but Halliburton said nothing presumably because doing the job correctly would have cost too much. And, hell, Halliburton is in business to make money. Halliburton isn’t on the ballot next Tuesday, but it might as well be. Robert Reich is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future , now in bookstores. This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org .

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Gordon Brown: Climate Change Action Is Economic Common Sense

October 10, 2010

Today, thousands of environmental campaigners will hold workshops on climate change, sponsored by the website Avaaz.org . There will be more than 6,000 events in 170 countries — a powerful human signal that, even after a year of disappointment, the climate change movement will not die — or fade away. It is powered by the most elemental of human instincts — our sense of responsibility to our children, and the threats we see to their future. And the fight has never been more urgent. The future is coming to meet us now: there are new climate change refugees and evacuees every day. This week I spoke to the past Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai about the terrible loss of livelihoods occurring through deforestation — and about our need to move forward reforestation initiatives in the Congo Basin, Amazon and Borneo. And last week I also spoke to Jens Stoltenberg, the Prime Minister of Norway, whose UN group is planning how we raise 100 billion dollars a year for post-2020 funding of adaptation and mitigation in the poorest countries. And now, in the autumn of 2010, in a world climbing back from the global financial crisis, climate change should be at the top of the agenda of every government for another reason: investment in low carbon technologies offers us a way out of a lost decade of slow growth and high unemployment. The case for climate change action is not just a moral crusade — it is an economic necessity. It can be a major component in the engine of growth — and massively reduce the world’s levels of unemployment. As I will argue in a forthcoming book, low carbon technologies, renewables and balanced energy polices — and their export potential — represent a new way of living that can help free Europe and America from today’s high unemployment and the specter of economic stagnation. Despite the disappointments of Copenhagen, China’s five year plan will this year give greater priority to low carbon development — not least the export of wind turbines. 2010 will also see the expansion of India’s solar mission; more evidence of Brazil’s climate change ambitions; and the results of Norway’s joint effort with Brazil, Indonesia and Guyana to finance forestation on a new pay-by-results basis. But the biggest driver of climate change action — and the biggest job creator of all — could be a European Union commitment to a low carbon energy super-grid as a mega pan-European initiative. The evidence is compelling. Carbon emissions came down 7 per cent in 2008. The EU is now on course to meet its minimum target for 2020 of a 2O per cent reduction in emissions (-17 per cent already). Today — with a huge surplus of carbon permits in the system, and a carbon price at just 15 Euros per ton — companies have more incentive to invest in a new generation of gas, coal and oil-fired generation power stations than in low carbon technologies. However, the European Climate Foundation’s “Roadmap 2050″ shows that with a bold set of policy decisions now, renewables, nuclear and carbon capture and storage could supply 40% more carbon free electricity by 2050. A low carbon European super-grid — an enhanced transmission network, connecting power sources to demand across and beyond the continent — is the most productive, ethical and practical way forward. The super grid is an asset that makes economic and environmental sense. And by investing an additional 1OO billion dollars a year to 2050, thousands of jobs and exports will follow. A carbon price of 20-30 Euros per ton of CO2 — on a par with the expected 2050 oil price — would make such a decarbonized power system no more expensive than a carbonized system — but much cleaner and more employment friendly. Green technologies can give Europe — and if they choose, America — economic advantage at home and export potential abroad. Those of us at the vanguard of climate change action have always understood that the environment is beyond price. Without a clean and sustainable world we will simply cease to be. But now we can add economic common sense to the argument for change — because growth and new jobs for today’s 2OO million unemployed global workers can come from environmental strategies based on low carbon technologies. The challenge of climate change is not just a moral issue for our time, but an opportunity to make the world’s economic future stronger and more secure.

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Robyn Greenspan: 2010 World Business Forum: Al Gore’s Slides Can Save the Planet

October 8, 2010

Not on stage at Radio City Music Hall during the two days of the World Business Forum but omnipresent, was the economy, and with an upcoming election, President Obama took a few jabs from Jack Welch and political advisor David Gergen . The former CEO of GE, who openly endorsed John McCain at the 2008 World Business Forum, criticized the President as being anti-business and improperly handling the auto bailout by “cutting the throats of investors.” Gergen accused the White House as suffering from groupthink and alienating the business community, which, he said, is hurting the recovery. “He needs to bring some CEOs in. They are sitting on cash.” Obama might also want to invite Al Gore in for another look at his awesome PowerPoint, too. The former Vice President — or as he said, “he used to be the next President of the United States” — again expertly connected the dots between the climate crisis, sustainable capitalism and opportunity for global environmental and economic improvement. While he avoided reopening the debate on reasons for invading Iraq, Gore began by affirming the global economy’s dependence on an oil market dominated by the Persian Gulf, and “the thought of it being disrupted or under control of those who could use it as a geopolitical weapon is something not easily dismissed.” Abandoning the polluting 100-year-old technologies of the past to prepare for a sustainable 21st century could break our dependence, put people to work and save the economy, asserts the former Vice President, but we collectively suffer from inertia, which works as the enemy of change. It’s partially because we can’t wrap our heads around something that’s unprecedented. “We have a tendency to think if it didn’t happen in the past, it’s not likely to happen in the future. We never had to think about the relationship between us and the environment.” Gore cites three major contributors to the climate crisis: the global population explosion, which taxes resources; the dramatic expansion of the power-draining technologies we use; and finally, the way we think about capitalism. “Capitalism is the most efficient form of organizing economic activity the world has ever seen. It unlocks the human potential. It has a set of organic and ubiquitous incentives. It’s great that capitalism is our system,” asserted the Nobel Prize winner, however, he argued, it is long past time to address the structural problems that distorted the way we operate. It’s the short-term thinking that recently brought down the financial system and how that same lack of vision prevents long-range environmental solution planning. We’re entering a period of consequences, he said, leading to eventual collapse. Michael Liebreich, chief executive of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, asked Gore why there was so much polarization around global warming in the U.S. “There is a disinformation campaign going on. Large carbon polluters spend money to create false doubts on things that are real. The ship is bearing down, but large carbon polluters are in the boat saying it’s not real.” Gore urged World Business Forum delegates to affect change through political action, and press the Senate to release their stranglehold on policies through filibusters, which, he said, are influenced by special interest groups. “It’s important to change light bulbs, but it’s more important to change the laws.” Economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz advocated for political action of another kind — more stimulus money, as the initial package was too small and not well-designed, he said. “If it hadn’t been for the stimulus, the unemployment would have peaked. Millions of Americans who had jobs otherwise would not. It’s clear, that with the end of the stimulus the economy is getting weaker. Something has to be done.” Unfortunately, the optimal time may have passed, as Obama had opportunity after the election. Today he is more politically constrained. “When you hear we can’t afford another stimulus, it’s not true. We can’t afford not to.” Stiglitz didn’t rule out the dreaded “double dip,” as there are too many potential influencers, but he did say with certainty there was not enough job creation. With 1-in-6 Americans out of work and a labor force growing at one percent per year, a large number of long-term unemployed is likely. “Getting back into the market is much more difficult. The new normal will be high unemployment.”

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Video: Yeo Says BP Must Not Take `Excessive’ Blame for Spill

September 8, 2010

Sept. 8 (Bloomberg) — Tim Yeo, chairman of the U.K. Energy and Climate Committee, talks about BP Plc’s report into the Deepwater Horizon accident and the U.K.’s own investigation. He speaks with Ryan Chilcote on Bloomberg Television’s “Countdown”.

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Video: Yeo Says BP Must Not Take `Excessive’ Blame for Spill

September 8, 2010

Sept. 8 (Bloomberg) — Tim Yeo, chairman of the U.K. Energy and Climate Committee, talks about BP Plc’s report into the Deepwater Horizon accident and the U.K.’s own investigation. He speaks with Ryan Chilcote on Bloomberg Television’s “Countdown”.

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Video: HSBC’s Robins Sees 20-Fold Rise in Electric Cars by 2020

September 6, 2010

Sept. 6 (Bloomberg) — Nick Robins, head of the Climate Change Centre of Excellence at HSBC Holdings Plc, talks about the outlook for the so-called climate economy, including energy and transportation. He speaks with Andrea Catherwood on Bloomberg Television’s “The Pulse.”

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Sunil Sharan: Deregulation, the Forsaken Panacea for Climate Change

August 23, 2010

Congress has abandoned yet another climate bill. Gridlock in the august body looms large come November, dampening hopes of effective energy legislation in the foreseeable future. America is stuck. Yet deregulation, a concept all but renounced by the country a decade back in the wake of California’s energy crisis, holds the potential to unlock the gates to climatic heaven. Many American utilities have for long operated as virtual monopolies in their respective jurisdictions so much so that the service territory itself is quite often ingrained into their name. Georgia Power, Southern California Edison, Detroit Edison, Nevada Power, the list is seemingly endless. Aspiring utilities have traditionally found it prohibitive to enter the domain of incumbents. In such an uncompetitive environment, customers are relegated as “rate-payers,” with little choice of suppliers or services. Deregulation would herald competition and break down the bastions of utility protectionism. The European Union mandated liberalization (their term for deregulation) throughout the region four years ago. The fear of a behemoth like EDF of France coming into Italy and snatching a chunk of its customers made the Italian utility Enel roll out the largest grid modernization project in the world five years ago. It thereby transformed its one-trick energy delivery pipe into a multi-faceted platform for customer care. Countries like Germany and Spain have become global leaders in renewable energy. Competition has driven industry consolidation, with big fish such as EDF, Enel, E.ON, and Vattenfall snapping up smaller utilities and improving productivity through economies of scale. Choice now on tap, customers are finally able to dump dirty energy purveyors and switch to greener providers. No wonder Europe is far ahead of the rest of the world in deploying almost every type of clean energy. Currently only about a dozen states in the U.S. allow consumers a mostly-restricted form of choice of electricity providers, with Texas, the largest electricity market in the country, being the most free-wheeling. Deregulation there was phased in beginning in 2002 and is now implemented in over half the state. It is ascribed to have instigated large-scale deployments of smart-grid and wind-energy technologies. Companies like Green Mountain Energy that sell power generated purely from renewable sources have sprung up. Electricity prices in the state, after many years of hovering substantially above the national average, are trending downward, almost touching the mean this year, allaying the fear held by some that deregulation causes prices to rise unsustainably. Texas has become the bellwether for the rest of the country to open up electricity markets. What a contrast from how California went about deregulating itself in the late nineties. In fact, to even call its half-baked experiment as deregulation is a misnomer. The state allowed new entrants into electricity wholesaling while freezing consumer rates, setting the stage for wholesale prices to be manipulated by the likes of Enron when demand for electricity outstripped supply. For deregulation to succeed, both the retail and wholesale ends of electricity have to be opened up, just as Texas has done, so that demand and supply can track one another. Things went so awry for California that the entire nation stood spooked, effectively putting the idea of deregulation in cold storage. Some states still tinkered with the notion but Bush-era feds all but washed their hands off it. The Obama administration decided that clean energy in the country needed a jump start and proceeded to offer utilities a generous stimulus package. Deregulation would still remain off the agenda. Many utilities, already flush with cash, were now able to double dip into two set of pubic funds, the stimulus as well as “rate case” dollars, to enhance their operational infrastructure, without touching their own money. (A rate case transfers the cost of approved capital expenditure to rate-payers, typically as an ongoing monthly charge.) Most other industries have no such luxury; they have to leverage their cash flow for operational upgrades. With hopes fading for another round of clean energy stimulus, and other carbon-reduction schemes such as a capping of emissions or a federal standard for renewable energy generation subject to the vagaries of a squabbling Congress, America’s greening could soon grind to a halt. The stimulus provided utilities with a carrot, now it is time to pull up their socks. Deregulation, in effect, competition, would move the onus from already-strapped tax-payers squarely onto cash-rich utilities, and without the opprobrium that something like cap-and-trade seems to provoke. As has happened in Europe, deregulation in the US will make utilities more efficient, responsive, and hungry. It will release pent-up market forces, incentivizing fleet-footed utilities to thrive and forcing the dead-beats to mend their ways. It will transform rate-payers into customers, who would demand to be treated as such now that they would have the option of taking their custom elsewhere. With such obvious benefits, is it not high time that the US shed its fear of deregulation and brings it out of the closet? Europe, and at home, Texas, have both proven that it works, and that too on a large scale.

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John F. Wasik: What to Create Millions of Jobs? Look to China

August 13, 2010

How to beat China at its own game By John F. Wasik American politicians campaigning now would do well to stop polarizing the climate change debate and start talking about jobs, economic development and beating China at its own game. That would mean employing social capitalism to create a powerful national energy plan that ignites the private sector through public incentives. Although the Chinese are faced with horrible environmental conditions, at least they are doing something about it and may win an economic war in the process. Aided by a currency peg to the dollar — many say an unfair manipulation that has hurt U.S. exports — the Chinese are currently winning the trade battle. Imports from China surged to $33 billion in July, a figure not seen since the dark days of 2008, ballooning the U.S. trade deficit with the People’s Republic. To date, U.S. policymakers are losing the Earth Race and the only environmental target they can hit are their own feet. The Chinese recently pulled ahead in the contest, announcing through its State Information Center that it would spend $738 billion in renewable energy projects over the next decade. INVESTMENT-STRATEGIES/ By any measure, that’s a great leap ahead of U.S. clean-tech efforts. The stimulus plan set aside about $36 billion for a host of U.S. Department of Energy-led projects in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown. In contrast, China’s stimulus investment for reducing greenhouse gas emissions was $221 billion, according to a report by British Bank HSBC. What’s at stake isn’t whether climate change will be tackled this year by the world’s largest economy. It’s a matter of millions of new jobs that will likely flow to China, Germany and any other country with a comprehensive policy. Even poor, tiny Portugal has a better energy plan — it gets more than one-fifth of its energy from renewable sources, whereas the U.S. only gets 4%. The International Energy Agency estimates that there’s a $27 trillion market for clean-tech over the next 50 years. If the U.S. just captures 14% of this business, that creates 850,000 new jobs, reports the World Wildlife Fund. Clean energy is not only a proven job creator, it’s relatively recession proof, according to a Pew Charitable Trust study. It declined only 6.6% last year despite one of the worst economic climates since the 1930s. A tremendous opportunity for America is being lost as Washington has stumbled at every turn this year when it had a chance to launch a world-class energy policy. DAVOS/GREEN Despite the passage of a U.S. House plan to address climate change and promote energy projects, the Senate was unable to bring any energy bill to the floor and recessed this summer without doing a thing. Not even the largest oil spill in history was a call to arms. Misguided deficit hawks have been deriding clean-tech as an expendable line-item. Some $3.5 billion in renewable energy loan guarantees have been rescinded this year, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group. And an untold number of clean-tech ventures have been put on hold. If the U.S. doesn’t get in this game soon in a big way, it will be playing catch-up for years. So, to help our country along, here is what we must do: • Increase and extend loan guarantees and tax breaks for all clean-tech companies over decades, not year to year. A national energy program shouldn’t be subject to the political climate of the moment. • Create incentives for all consumers to buy clean power. There’s a reason why Germany is one of the largest manufacturers and consumers of solar power appliances. Utilities buy back home-generated power over time. The U.S. needs a renewable energy portfolio standard to do the same. • Create financing that favors energy-efficient buildings. That means widespread programs for “green” mortgages that offer lower rates for environmentally friendly buildings. That would stimulate the overall housing market and green building. • Enact a permanent national trust fund to build/repair infrastructure in an environmentally friendly way. By my rough estimate, we need at least $5 trillion to fix crumbling roads, bridges, water systems and other public amenities. (The estimate is based on what the American Society of Civil Engineers projected should be spent to fix up essential infrastructure in 2009 minus what was allocated by the stimulus plan.) Washington has battled many enemies over the years and rallied Americans to the cause. When it comes to forging a long-term, job-producing U.S. energy policy, though, their worst nemeses are stateside. So having an external foe may rouse more productive emotion than simply citing numbers and bungled opportunities. John F. Wasik is the author of The Audacity of Help: Obama’s Economic Plan and the Remaking of America From Reuters.com

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Video: Yeo Sees `Political Risk’ of Operating in U.S. After BP

August 2, 2010

Aug. 2 (Bloomberg) — Tim Yeo, chairman of the U.K. Energy and Climate Committee, talks about the fallout from BP Plc’s leak in the Gulf of Mexico. He speaks on Bloomberg Television’s “The Pulse” with Andrea Catherwood.

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Gregory Unruh: Survival Instinct: Businesses Must Turn to Mother Nature

July 28, 2010

It’s an age-old story. An entrepreneur enters a complacent industry with a startling innovation. The start-up’s market share steadily grows and before long, it’s the new behemoth. But then the surviving competitors, backed against the wall, counter with their own innovations that neutralize the new behemoth’s advantage. Soon, the new behemoth is scrambling for survival, its former success rendered meaningless in the new competitive landscape. This isn’t a story about Microsoft and Apple. It’s a story about weeds. Several decades ago Monsanto, one of the large agribusiness firms developed a new herbicide called “RoundUp.” Revolutionary at the time, RoundUp came to dominate the market because it was both highly effective and broke down quickly, making it less toxic than other herbicides in common use. But the innovative breakthrough that made Monsanto’s success was genetically engineering staple crops so they were resistant to RoundUp (branded RoundUp Ready). This innovation meant farmers could spray their entire fields with RoundUp, but only kill the weeds, saving a huge amount of time. No weeds means that farmers don’t need to till their fields–a huge ecological boon. And no-till farming equates to fewer emissions, less soil-erosion and less chemical runoff. But this story doesn’t have a happy ending. The weeds weren’t content to just die off. As the use of RoundUp and RoundUp Ready crops has become ubiquitous, the weeds developed innovations of their own – an evolved resistance to RoundUp. As a result, Monsanto and its customers are scrambling. Farmers are returning to tilling and using older, more toxic herbicides to control weeds. There is even some concern that the revenge of the weeds will cause agricultural yields to fall for some crops. If so, the price of crops – like corn, soy beans and cotton where RoundUp Ready seeds were most popular – could rise. From a business perspective the strategic errors are evident. No competent executive would ignore competitive moves made by rivals. Indeed, one of the main responsibilities of management is to think about, anticipate and plan for competitive gambits. I spend a lot of my time convincing companies they should emulate the biosphere if they want to be sustainable. But it’s also time we begin thinking of the biosphere within the framework of competitive strategy. Just like traditional competitors, the biosphere will react and adapt to any business strategy that affects it. In a way, we need to go back to learn from the master – Mother Nature. After all, the biosphere’s rule of survival of the fittest gives us an ideal model of competitive adaptation and interplay. Predators get stronger and prey get sneakier, predators get smarter and prey get faster, and so on to produce the diversity and dynamism of the natural world today. It’s a continual refrain for humanity. Monsanto failed to view weeds as a competitor who would react to their innovation. Far too many companies act similarly–as if the impact they have on the planet will not change the competitive landscape and that the biosphere won’t react. A recent article from The Climate Desk by Felix Salmon notes how few companies have even begun to think about contingency plans–or competitive responses more properly–to the biosphere’s adaptation to the changing climate. The private sector shouldn’t be singled out here. It’s time for the biosphere to figure into more strategic plans–as a partner and a competitor–that is constantly adapting. Cross-posted from Forbes

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Danny Schechter: The Eleven Pens of Barack Obama

July 27, 2010

With eleven pens for souvenirs, President Obama signed the financial reform bill in a rare celebratory moment. Significantly, the ceremony did not take place in the Oval Office but up the block at the Ronald Reagan building perhaps to signal recalcitrant Republicans that this is a cause they should sign on to. It wasn’t clear if he was aware that he was signing up for the a new volatile phase of struggle to rein in out of control financial power. The three GOP lawmakers who voted for the bill receiving a standing O, from the largely democratic crowd that watched Obama embrace Paul Volcker while Elizabeth Warren stood by applauding (before taking her picture with the former Fed head.) Warren’s presence didn’t make many news stories or the Times photo caption perhaps because many — mostly bankers and some Obama advisors — want her out of the picture permanently. They say Banks need protection too. Quips David Sirota, “Not to put too fine a point on it, but the new agency is called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, it is not called the Bank Financial Protection Bureau (as, frankly, you might call the rest of the government).” She could be appointed right now to head the new consumer protection bureau without approval by the Senate. But will she? No sooner was the bill signed than there were emails from Obama operatives flying around the country claiming credit for an achievement that looked unlikely for months, sustained the heaviest Lobbyist attack in history, and won praise from all the advocacy groups who realized that while the bill was flawed, rationalized it as the best they could squeeze out of Congress in this climate. Republicans are predicting it will lead to job losses. Minority leader Mitch McConnell regurgitated a familiar mantra saying: The White House will declare this bill a victory. But for millions of Americans struggling to find work, for millions of small-business owners bracing themselves for all the new regulations they’ll have to deal with, for ordinary Americans who just wanted to see an end to the bailouts, this bill is no victory. (Of course, there was no reference to the Republicans who initiated the bailouts, or, of course, the “ordinary Americans want jobs!) Now, the businesses that could be regulated under the bill are launching an effort to reform the Reform bill — their way — to make sure the rules that are still to be written will not be too hard on them. The Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable have their hatchets out by continuing the full court press lobbying effort that did force compromises in the bill. Of course, they position what they are doing only in the most positive light. “We will work with President Obama and policy makers to ensure that this legislation is implemented in a manner that continues to promote sustainable economic growth and job creation,” says Roundtable honcho Larry Burton. Not only is this bla bla contrived, but it is also flawed in a more fundamental way because there is no job creation to continue, in large part, because the private sector is not creating jobs. In fact corporations are stashing trillions that they are not using for job growth. You expect business to oppose regulations on business but the Daily Beast carried an article suggesting that some savvy Wall Streeters actually want stricter regulations. Author Randall Lane writes: Upon passage, the standard response was to publicly grumble but privately rejoice about a bill that could have been far more punitive. But as I asked around over the past few days, there’s been a shift: many on Wall Street now view financial reform as a wasted opportunity — to make the rules that govern them even tighter. They won’t say this officially. They might not even say it to their peers, in the same way they won’t tell others on the desk they really dig Glee . But privately, one-on-one, the most deliberative Wall Street hitters I know recognize that they need a system that saves them both from themselves, as well as potentially capricious regulators. This new law, while well-intentioned and likely better than nothing, effectively accomplishes neither. Lane argues that, “Wall Street craves — and needs — rules, and the discipline to enforce them consistently. If left to its own self-interest, Wall Street couldn’t function.” In this view, the bill was not tough enough even with the many compromises the biggest firms won to allow them to circumvent the law. Wall Street’s new battleground is over the shape of the rules to come. The Washington Post reports: The SEC is required to issue 95 new regulations governing a wide swath of the financial sector, dozens more than the Federal Reserve, the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or other federal agencies. The SEC is also slated to complete 17 one-time studies and five new ongoing reports, according to a tally by the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell. The SEC does not exactly have a reputation for moving quickly. They missed Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme for a decade, but now say they are going after more cases of corporate fraud in the aftermath of the $550 million dollar settlement they won from Goldman Sachs. The problem is that they are only settling cases, not prosecuting fraudsters. Progressives have an agenda too, to strengthen reform. They will be fighting to, in Zack Carter’s buzz words, “Break Up The Banks … Tax Wall Street Gambling … End The Foreclosure Nightmare…” There are also concerns with the future of the taxpayer billions invested in mortgage lenders “Freddie” and “Fannie.” While all this goes on in the foreground, in the background there’s panic about the economy’s stubborn refusal to rebound. Ben Bernanke at the Fed expects unemployment to linger for years. His arsenal of economic weaponry seems out of ammunition. He is now “unusually uncertain.” Huh? Stress tests of banks are expected to show a capital hole. When the six-month extension of unemployment benefits squeaked through the Senate, there was a sigh of relief among those in need, and cheers from Democrats who have not been able to move the unemployment needle or restore confidence in the economy. What happens after six months? Putting money in the pockets of consumers will create some bounce, but it doesn’t deal with the deep structural and systemic problems that worry economists and governments worldwide. What they see are 800 insolvent banks, industries shrinking, state and local governments on the verge of bankruptcy and escalating debt. They see China rising and the West sinking. A million foreclosures are expected this year while in the know advocates like Paul Krugman warn of stagnation and a creeping depression. Others say a double dip recession is already here. Shrill partisan voices make it hard for the public to focus on any solutions. So there is no jobs bill despite a bill seeking Local Jobs For America. So far, only a few brave voices are calling for major cutbacks in defense or inflated intelligence spending as the wars we cannot win continue to drain us like those knives that leave a thousand cuts. Many banks are falsifying their earnings but still considered too big to fail. My view they are not too big to jail, yet there is no public pressure from progressives for the prosecution of Wall Street criminals as I call for in my film PLUNDER. So, by all means, let’s be grateful for small victories, but we can’t substitute symbolic steps with a real recovery that, every day, looks further and further away, News Dissector Danny Schechter directed Plunder the Crime Of Our Time a DVD arguing that sees the financial crisis as a crime story. It is screening at the NetRoots Conference in Vegas. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org

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Rep. Pete Stark: Currency Tax — A Way to Invest in Our Future

July 20, 2010

Each day, $4 trillion dollars of currency are traded. For international businesses and travelers, trading dollars for other currencies serve a legitimate purpose. However, nearly 80% of these transactions are undertaken by a handful of major banks. Experts agree that most of these transactions are made for purely speculative purposes. Wealthy traders and big financial institutions make huge bets on the fluctuations in currency value and they can make massive profits if their bets are correct. This type of speculation helped to worsen the recent financial crisis and serves no purpose other than making a few people and institutions even richer . Today, I introduced H.R. 5783, the Investing in Our Future Act. My legislation would simply impose a small tax — of five thousandths of one percent, or 0.005% — on these currency transactions. The money raised would be put toward investments in children, global health, and climate change mitigation. For the average person or business, this small tax will hardly be noticed. But, due to the extreme speculation that takes place, it would raise significant funds. Studies estimate that a worldwide 0.005 percent tax on dollar transactions would raise $28 billion a year and reduce currency speculation by 14 percent. Here at home, the funds from this fee would be used to improve the quality and affordability of childcare. This funding would provide more childcare options, so that working families can obtain the quality care their children need to begin school ready to learn. Internationally, the bill would create a U.S. fund to assist developing countries with the impacts of global warming. At the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December, President Obama pledged to fund our country’s commitment to mitigating the effects of climate change. This bill would make that promise real. Finally, the legislation would create a Global Health Trust Fund to fight HIV/AIDS, Malaria, Tuberculosis and other diseases that kill millions of people each year in developing nations. This money will fund treatments and prevention for these diseases, as well as research aimed at eradicating them altogether. For too long the needs of the financial industry have trumped initiatives that will help lift people out of poverty and give children a healthy start. The Investing in Our Future Act will aid in getting our priorities back in order, and reduce financial speculation by Wall Street. You can help – please call your Member of Congress and tell them to sign on as a co-sponsor of H.R. 5783. Find your member at http://house.gov

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Marc Stoiber: Mitigation: The Wrong Way to Look at Green Innovation

July 7, 2010

I had the good fortune to sit down with Guy Dauncey this week. Dauncey is an author and speaker on climate change , and always has great insights into the sociological side of sustainability. When I asked his thoughts on green innovation, he said most companies and governments have it wrong. They continue to frame the story of climate change as a problem that they want to make go away — in short, they limit their thinking to mitigation. Mitigation, Dauncey said, is by definition the act of minimizing loss or damage suffered. As he wrote in his recent essay ‘Seven New Ideas,’ the mitigation mindset: …sends a very unfortunate message, encouraging people to think of the world’s current energy, forestry and farming regimes as ‘normal’, and just in need of some adjustments and emissions reductions to make the climate threat go away. This encourages a defensive, unimaginative approach to the climate problem. Losing With the Kyoto Soccer Team Dauncey had a very timely analogy. He asked what would happen if the framers of the Kyoto Protocol were a soccer team. Based on their mitigation mindset, they would likely always play in full defense, hoping they could stop global warming from scoring too many goals. Following this reasoning, a 0-0 draw would be seen as a victory. Certainly, having a strong defensive game is vital. But without exception, winning requires a team to play offense. And that doesn’t happen unless they have a vision of success. Envision the World You Want. Then Start Innovating. Whether it’s soccer, war, the establishment of democracy, or the fight for a sustainable planet, a positive outcome always begins with a vision. Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t change American segregationist politics with a limiting “Let us mitigate the evils of our society.” Instead, he framed his vision with the awe-inspiring ” I Have A Dream ” speech. John F. Kennedy’s vision was just as grand: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.” The clarity, inspiration, and awesome magnitude of Kennedy’s goal successfully launched the Apollo project . Indeed, sustainability leaders have annexed the term Apollo to catalyze a vision of a clean energy revolution. Today, we can see that vision framed in Obama’s call for a rapidly accelerated clean energy policy. It remains to be seen whether his clarion call inspires Americans to the dramatic shift in thinking necessary to get this project into orbit. Grand, Yes. Unreasonable, No. The concept of a world sustained by clean energy and infinitely renewable resources may seem hopelessly optimistic. Until, as Dauncey says, one considers that our relationship with fossil fuels spans a mere 200 year slice of time. If we spent thousands of years prior harvesting energy from firewood, does it seem far-fetched that we might spend thousands of years in the future harvesting energy from clean sources that already exist? Using this analogy, we see why corporations cling to the concept of mitigation. It allows them to hang onto the status quo, or perhaps change it by degrees, which limits discomfort and doesn’t challenge thinking. Although this defensive stance has been proven time and again to lessen innovation, progress, and profit, it is inevitable when there’s no grand vision for the future to take its place. When business leaders dare to proclaim a grand vision, the results can be exhilarating. You only need to look as far as Dupont’s remarkable green transformation, or GE’s Ecomagination , to see proof. Fortunately, the current ‘triple threat’ of recession, health care insecurity, and climate crisis are creating a growing tide of dissatisfaction with the status quo — precisely the motivator executives need to put their foot down and proclaim a new way forward. A Vision That Works for Your Company. To become reality, a bold vision needs to work on a number of levels: Does the vision reinforce your brand? A vision needs to be a projection of both what is possible, and what consumers expect from you. A computer company with a vision for creating zero waste electronics recycling makes sense. A computer company creating green apartment buildings does not. Does the vision engage your entire team? JFK mobilized an army of scientists to bring the Apollo vision to life. Martin Luther King Jr inspired millions to march. Involving your entire team in the creation and execution of your vision will fuel the excitement, and most likely lead to results that surpass your original dream. Does the vision come with a timeline, steps for execution, and progress measurement? A vision should be a reach — but not a prayer. Your team needs to know they have the resources to get the job done. They also need to know their performance will be measured on hitting specific targets on time, and on budget. Without these practical considerations, your team will be quickly demoralized, and your leadership called into question. With these guidelines in mind, corporations can frame their vision, boldly explore new green space and create new innovation. The results will be exciting, profitable, and anything but limiting.

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Climate-Change Measure Lacks Momentum Even After BP Spill, Democrats Say

June 16, 2010

By Lisa Lerer and Simon Lomax June 16 (Bloomberg) — The BP Plc oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is unlikely to create enough momentum to pass a comprehensive climate bill sought by President Barack Obama , say leading Senate Democrats. Many Democrats don’t want to vote in this election year on whether to cap the greenhouse-gas emissions linked to climate change, saying they prefer to work in the coming months on legislation directly responding to the spill. “The climate bill isn’t going to stop the oil leak,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein , a California Democrat. “The first thing you have to do is stop the oil leak.” Obama, in a speech to the nation last night, praised a climate plan passed by the House last year and said the U.S. “can’t afford not to change how we produce and use energy.” Earlier this month, he said the only way to develop clean energy is by “finally putting a price on carbon pollution.” The House voted last June to create the first national limits on greenhouse-gas emissions. The measure would regulate carbon dioxide from power plants, refineries and factories through a cap-and-trade program in which companies buy and sell a declining number of pollution rights. Senator John Kerry , a Massachusetts Democrat who introduced similar legislation in his chamber last month, said yesterday that it doesn’t have the votes yet needed to overcome a Republican filibuster. “We don’t have the 60 votes yet, I know that,” Kerry told reporters. “But we’re close enough to be able to fight for it.” November Elections Some Democratic lawmakers have raised concerns that voting on the climate plan could create a political backlash in the November elections. “There’s not a great call for it in the Democratic caucus,” said West Virginia Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller , who has argued against taking up the bill. Feinstein said last week she believed climate legislation could be passed next year. As an alternative, Democrats are working on an energy plan that would increase safety regulations on offshore drilling, raise or eliminate the cap on oil companies’ economic liability, promote energy efficiency and mandate more use of renewable electricity. “The front wheel of anything we do on energy is going to be addressing regulations and safety with respect to offshore drilling, particularly deep-well drilling,” said Senator Byron Dorgan , a Democrat from North Dakota. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid , a Nevada Democrat, has asked committee leaders to draft energy provisions to bring to the floor next month. Democrats plan to meet tomorrow to discuss what should be included. Republican Support Reid would be unlikely to include a climate provision in the bill unless it had significant Republican support, Reid spokesman Jim Manley said in an e-mail. Republican backing would be needed to offset likely opposition from Democrats representing some rural and industrial states, who fear capping greenhouse gases would raise electric bills for consumers and business. To counter those concerns, Kerry and Lieberman yesterday released a study by the Environmental Protection Agency that said the plan would cost the average U.S. household less than dollar a day. Still, Senate Republicans and some Democrats from rural states say they see little connection between the oil spill and legislation to cap greenhouse-gas emissions. Coal Emissions “It’s unrelated,” said Senator Ben Nelson , a Democrat from Nebraska. “Obviously the emissions that we are talking about are primarily coal-fired electricity generation from Nebraska. That doesn’t have much to do with the Gulf.” No Republicans have supported Kerry-Lieberman legislation thus far. South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham , who worked on a climate bill with the pair for months, dropped his support in late April. Republicans said yesterday that Obama shouldn’t use the Gulf spill to rally support for cap-and-trade legislation. The cost of carbon dioxide allowances is effectively a “new national energy tax” that will do nothing to “stop this spill and clean it up,” said Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. The “justifiable public outrage” over the oil spill shouldn’t be employed “as a tool for pushing a divisive new climate change policy,” he said. Energy-Only Bill Senator Jeff Bingaman , a New Mexico Democrat and chairman of the Senate Energy and Commerce committee, said yesterday he plans to advocate for an energy-only bill that passed his panel last June. The measure would require utilities to get as much as 15 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2021. The Senate “should definitely do an energy bill” that doesn’t include a carbon cap-and-trade program, said Senator Kent Conrad , a North Dakota Democrat. Kerry and Lieberman could be given a chance to add their climate plan as an amendment, he said. The White House and other supporters of a climate bill want a comprehensive plan to be the main legislative vehicle, arguing that public concern over the oil spill provides momentum. “Now is the moment for this generation to embark on a national mission to unleash American innovation and seize control of our own destiny,” Obama said in his speech last night. Pollster Joel Benenson said surveys he conducted for the League of Conservation Voters showed that 63 percent of likely voters contacted in May and June said they would support legislation to “limit pollution” by “charging energy companies for carbon pollution in electricity or fuels like gas.” “In the aftermath of the spill, people firmly believe Congress needs to do more than just make BP pay,” wrote Benenson, who conducted polling for Obama’s presidential campaign. “It would take 60 votes in the Senate,” to pass a climate bill, Dorgan said yesterday on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal. “I doubt very much whether those 60 votes exist right now.” To contact the reporters on this story: Lisa Lerer in Washington at llerer@bloomberg.net ; Simon Lomax in Washington at slomax@bloomberg.net .

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Video: Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s Pooley Discusses Global Warming: Video

June 11, 2010

June 11 (Bloomberg) — Bloomberg Businessweek’s Eric Pooley talks with Bloomberg’s Matt Miller about his book “The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth” and BP Plc. (Source: Bloomberg)

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Video: Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s Pooley Discusses Global Warming: Video

June 11, 2010

June 11 (Bloomberg) — Bloomberg Businessweek’s Eric Pooley talks with Bloomberg’s Matt Miller about his book “The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth” and BP Plc. (Source: Bloomberg)

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Turmoil in U.S. Politics Creates Lack of Clarity for CEO Decision-Making

June 10, 2010

By Lisa Lerer and John McCormick June 10 (Bloomberg) — In a year of tumult in U.S. politics in which control of Congress appears up for grabs, the result for business leaders is a climate lacking the certainty they crave for decision-making. Those affected include Ralph Izzo , the chief executive officer of Public Service Enterprise Group , New Jersey’s largest utility. “The big unknown is whether or not Congress will take action on carbon dioxide,” said Izzo, as reported in the June 14 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek. “Absent clear environmental regulations, your long-term strategy is something you really have to equivocate on.” Energy policy is far from the only issue surrounded by such doubts. Action on taxes, trade, immigration, jobs programs, and the funding of entitlement programs such as Medicare all hinge on who controls the House and Senate. Already trying to absorb what the new health-care law and the financial regulation overhaul likely to clear Congress might do to profits, executives nationwide don’t know when, or if, lawmakers will move on other major legislation. The main discernible trend from the primaries, run-offs, and special elections held in 12 states on June 8 was that women won big, though money or Tea Party support seemed to matter more than gender. California Results In California, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina was chosen by state Republicans to face Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer in November’s general election. Meg Whitman , the former eBay chief who spent $71 million of her own money on the Republican gubernatorial primary, triumphed and will face Democrat Jerry Brown , a former governor. In Nevada, Sharron Angle , backed by Tea Party activists, outdistanced 11 other Republicans and won the nomination to square off against Senator Harry Reid , the leader of the chamber’s Democratic majority. Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas narrowly survived a Democratic primary challenge fueled by organized labor; she now faces an uphill re-election fight in November against Republican Representative John Boozman , who leads in the polls. Some of the June 8 results make business leaders nervous, raising concerns that both parties are moving toward more rigid ideological positions. Angle, for example, wants the federal Education Department eliminated and has called for the current tax code to be scrapped — views shared by many Tea Party activists. ‘Harder to Plan’ “This kind of extremism makes it much harder to plan from a business perspective,” said John Castellani , chief executive officer of the Business Roundtable , which represents chief executives. Castellani said he senses a record level of anxiety among his membership, more than 70 of whom attended a recent quarterly meeting, while 90 participated in February, the largest turnout in his decade with the group. His members, almost all heads of multinational corporations, are particularly concerned about stalled free-trade agreements and proposed new taxes on foreign income. “People are trying to discern what the trends are,” he said. “Are these candidates who are going to understand that 95 percent of the world lives outside the United States, or isolationists?” Interest in Lincoln William Lane , Washington director for Peoria, Illinois- based Caterpillar Inc ., watched the Arkansas race closely. The world’s largest maker of construction equipment backed Lincoln, the chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee who Lane called a “pro-business” Democrat. “None of us knows whether Republicans are going to have moderate success, significant success, or historic success,” Lane said. “But one thing that is clear is that the Congress is going to be re-centered after November.” For Lewis Hay , CEO of Juno Beach, Florida-based NextEra Energy Resources LLC , the largest renewable energy producer in North America, the results of individual races are less important than which party controls Congress. Democrats currently have the majority in both chambers. “One senator from Florida isn’t going to impact what we do in Florida very much, but the composition of the House and the Senate could very well have an impact,” he said. ‘No Regrets’ Investment Hay is following what he calls a “no regrets” investment strategy for NextEra. If Congress passes legislation setting a national mandate for alternative energy sources such as wind and solar, those industries will prove to be “very, very good investments,” he said. If Congress fails to act, the investments will still be good, though less profitable. “We would clearly invest a lot more, with more clarity on our climate and energy policy,” he said. “There’s a lot of capital sitting on the sidelines.” Izzo is monitoring elections in regions where the utility operates and other major races. “I’m a little more worried about how things change post-November than before,” he says. “Each day Congress waits puts us a little bit more behind.” To contact the reporters on this story: Lisa Lerer in Washington at llerer@bloomberg.net ; John McCormick in Chicago at jmccormick16@bloomberg.net

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Inflation in U.K. Accelerates Faster Than Forecast to Reach 17-Month High

May 18, 2010

By Scott Hamilton May 18 (Bloomberg) — U.K. inflation accelerated more than economists forecast in April to the fastest pace since 2008, enough to prompt a public letter of explanation from Bank of England Governor Mervyn King . Consumer prices rose 3.7 percent from a year earlier, compared with a 3.4 percent increase in March, the Office for National Statistics said today in London. Economists forecast a 3.5 percent rate, according to the median of 27 predictions in a Bloomberg News survey . With inflation above the government’s 3 percent upper limit three months after the previous breach, King must now write to Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne to say what he will do to bring prices under control. The Bank of England signaled last week that inflation may be peaking and will undershoot the 2 percent target next year because of slack in the economy . “By August we think inflation will have fallen back to around about 3 percent, but there’s obviously a chance it doesn’t,” George Buckley , chief U.K. economist at Deutsche Bank AG in London, said in a telephone interview before the announcement. “The bank seems to think there’s a huge amount of spare capacity and if that’s not true and there’s less spare capacity than they think, you get higher inflation.” Bonds Fall The pound remained higher against the dollar after the report and was up 0.2 percent to $1.4500 as of 9:35 a.m. in London. Bonds fell, with the yield on the 10-year gilt rising 4 basis points to 3.78 percent. Inflation was the fastest since November 2008. The rate rose because of higher costs of food and women’s clothing, and tax increases on alcohol and tobacco, the statistics office said. On the month, consumer prices climbed 0.6 percent. Economists predicted a 0.4 percent increase, according to the median of 21 forecasts in a separate Bloomberg News survey . The report contrasts with comments from retailers, which have said that food inflation is slowing. William Morrison Supermarkets Plc on May 6 reported a slowdown in sales growth as food prices slackened. J Sainsbury Plc Chief Executive Officer Justin King on May 13 said that the climate of “low-to-no inflation could well persist.” Seventh Letter Today’s letter will be the seventh since the central bank was granted independence in setting interest rates in 1997. U.K. law requires the governor to write to the chancellor when inflation misses the 2 percent target by more than a percentage point. This will be the first exchange of letters between King and Osborne, who became finance minister last week. The pound has lost about a quarter of its value on a trade – weighted basis since the start of 2007, stoking consumer prices. The cost of crude oil rose 3.4 percent in April and has climbed by about a fifth in the past year. “Further adjustment to the lower level of sterling, or increases in commodity prices as a result of strong global demand, might cause inflation to remain above target for longer” than just the rest of this year, the central bank said in its May 12 inflation report. “To the downside, spare capacity may exert a greater influence.” Osborne’s June 22 budget may yet stoke prices if he raises sales tax from the current 17.5 percent rate to narrow the record budget deficit . Prime Minister David Cameron , in a May 16 interview with the BBC, refused to rule out an increase. “The upside risk in the near term is that there’s a possibility of them raising value-added tax,” said Deutsche Bank’s Buckley. “Our forecast is for inflation to fall to about 2 percent by the end of the year and assuming no increase in value-added tax, which I think is a very big assumption.” Retail price inflation, a measure used to gauge the cost of living in wage negotiations, accelerated to 5.3 percent in April, the fastest pace since 1991. Excluding mortgage-interest payments, it quickened to 5.4 percent. To contact the reporter on this story: Scott Hamilton in London at shamilton8@bloomberg.net

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Senators Seek to Salvage Climate-Change Measure in Feud Over Immigration

April 26, 2010

By Kim Chipman April 26 (Bloomberg) — The fate of climate-change legislation is being weighed at the Capitol today by senators seeking to salvage a proposal aimed at fighting global warming and remaking the U.S. energy economy. The measure sponsored by Senators Lindsey Graham , John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman was to be made public today until Republican Graham pulled out to protest that the Obama administration and Senate Democratic leaders may act first to overhaul immigration laws. The three senators will meet today to discuss how to proceed, according to Lieberman spokesman Marshall Wittmann . “Any and all reports of the demise of energy legislation are greatly exaggerated,” Wittmann said in an e-mailed statement. “Not only is this bill very much alive but the senators are aggressively moving forward to remove any obstacles to getting it passed this year.” The dispute over the climate-change measure’s timing in Congress concerns how many politically divisive issues lawmakers are able or willing to tackle in coming months, as their attention turns increasingly to the November midterm elections. The overhaul of the U.S. health-care system dominated the first year of President Barack Obama ’s administration, and the Senate is now debating financial regulatory legislation. Graham of South Carolina has been working for more than six months with Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, on a compromise bill to cap greenhouse- gas pollution and develop new energy resources. ‘Cynical Ploy’ Senate Democratic leaders and Obama want to put immigration ahead of energy legislation as part of a “cynical ploy” to win votes for Democrats in the November elections, Graham said in an April 24 letter to groups including business leaders and environmentalists. “I deeply regret that election-year politics will impede, if not derail, our efforts to make our nation energy- independent,” Graham said. The senators plan to send their bill to the Environmental Protection Agency today for analysis, according to Wittmann. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said an EPA study will be completed before the measure is brought before the Senate. “Since it will take EPA about five weeks they ought to get started,” said Joseph Romm , a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a public-policy group in Washington that advises Democrats. Obama had told his Economic Advisory Board on April 17, “The financial regulatory reform will take several more weeks and then we’ll probably be transitioning next to look at on what can be done on the energy front.” Immigration Overhaul The president pressed anew last week for an overhaul of U.S. immigration policy, and Democratic congressional leaders said that legislation may advance this year if Reid can gain enough support. Calls to revamp federal immigration law grew as Arizona enacted a law last week requiring police to determine the immigration status of anyone an officer suspects is in the country without proper documentation. Inaction in Washington will lead to “misguided” efforts such as the Arizona measure, Obama said April 23. White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers said yesterday that both immigration and climate-change should be acted on, sidestepping the question of which issue Congress should take up next. “They are both important,” Summers said on the CBS program “Face the Nation.” “There is no either-or between energy and immigration reform.” Up to Reid Summers said it’s up to Reid, “for whatever reasons he has,” to set the Senate’s legislative calendar. Reid, a Nevada Democrat facing re-election in November, said immigration and energy legislation are “equally vital” to the nation’s economic and national security and have been “ignored too long.” “Energy could be next if it’s ready,” he said in an April 24 statement. “I have also said we will try to pass comprehensive immigration reform.” The last try at revamping the law to create a guest worker program and provide a path to citizenship for some of those living in the U.S. illegally was in 2007. That was blocked amid opposition from Republicans and some Democrats. Graham, along with Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York, has worked to come up with a framework for legislation that can win bipartisan support. Not the ‘Right Time’ Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said Congress shouldn’t try to overhaul immigration laws this year. “I just don’t think this is the right time,” McConnell of Kentucky said yesterday on “ Fox News Sunday .” Senator Saxby Chambliss , a Georgia Republican, said the Senate shouldn’t consider either climate change or immigration legislation. “I’m not sure how we can justify bringing either one of them up right now,” Chambliss said yesterday on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. Instead, the chamber should focus on spending bills, he said. Kerry, Graham and Lieberman had planned to unveil today a scaled-back version of “cap-and-trade” legislation passed by the House last year. The House measure would limit carbon emissions throughout the economy, establishing an emissions- trading market in pollution allowances. Critics such as billionaire investor Warren Buffett said that would amount to a burdensome energy tax on consumers. Utility Carbon-Trading The senators’ compromise would initially provide carbon trading solely for utilities, with manufacturers added later. Oil companies would get free allowances that would expire by a certain date. The measure also would provide for expanded offshore oil and gas drilling and incentives for nuclear power and “clean-coal” technology. Their proposed legislation already had won support from utilities such as Exelon Corp. , and people close to the matter said last week that oil companies including ConocoPhillips were prepared to sign on. The senators’ compromise, which would start taking effect in 2013, would require a 17 percent reduction in U.S. carbon emissions by 2020 and an 80 percent cut by 2050, according to people familiar with the legislation. To contact the reporter on this story: Kim Chipman in Washington at kchipman@bloomberg.net

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