Archive for May, 2008

Grist calls McCain the ‘cowardly lion’, we’ve called him similar, turns out he’s skipping another climate vote.

Lower Footprint is speaking my language, I go weeks sometimes without cooking and it is not sustainable in an environment sense, financial sense, or health sense.

You can’t permalink Green LA Girl, but if you’re fast you’ll find the post about the biodegradeable guitar picks. I’ve emailed it to my guitar playing buddies. Now if only the Jonas brothers could disappear in 90 days…

It wouldn’t be Friday without the EcoGeek’s update about solar power. God, I love nerds.

Treehugger has a post about the still yet-to-be-dealt-with corporate welfare for oil companies.

Have a great fin d’semaine! or, as they say in France, ‘weekend’,

By Robert Anton at The Element Agency in Vancouver

By Warren Carr of EcoNeutral, today’s guest blogger

As the business world wakes up to idea of offsetting, the astute, forward-thinking CEOs and Presidents are keenly aware of the looming prospect of public scrutiny. The concept of offsetting is definitely under fire because it can be seen as the way to buy away environmental sins. It’s not, and never should be, absolution.

It is part of the solution if the corporate offsetting plan is an element of an overall sustainability policy where the company takes on a program to perform their business in a more environmentally-responsible manner, develop a sustainability program, set realistic emission-reduction targets and offset their CO2 footprint from the beginning. Presumably that footprint will decrease as their policies and programs take effect.

Investigating the quality of the offsets is a necessary part of the equation. Tracing where they originate is simply a good business practice. The further they can be traced back the more certain the buyer can be of their authenticity and quality. If the trail goes cold quickly, then it’s time to find a different source.
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We have not been the kindest to oil companies here on MyGreenElement.com. It is easy to remain skeptical when firms like BP say they are for solar but end up investing in Alberta’s oil sands. There is a broad coalition trying to keep oil firms honest from all angles; activists, consumers, journalists, politicians. But an internal revolt from shareholders?

ExxonMobil, the world’s largest public oil company was founded by John D. Rockefeller (of Standard Oil which ultimately morphed into Exxon). His children still have a stake, albeit small, but immensely symbolic. They have come forward with a list of grievances that they will address at this year’s shareholder conference.

ExxonMobil is one of the few firms left that denies the need to combat climate change. And they have yet to make a big splash in the renewables sector. According to the Rockefeller letter, ExxonMobil is unprepared for “global policies aimed at curbing carbon dioxide and diversifying energy supplies.” Profits in the short term could mean extra liabilities tomorrow. Don’t deny the environment!

By Stefan Deeran at The Element Agency in New York

By Anne Carmack of The Ambrose Hotel, today’s guest blogger

These days offering hotel guests sustainable amenities, such as access to complimentary green transportation, organic menu items and guestrooms maintained with safer, non–toxic cleaners is becoming common place. Green dialogue has become a real part of the hospitality industry’s language.

By offering guests environmentally-conscious lodging facilities, we further support the consumers who are interested in reducing their negative impacts on the planet while providing healthy, eco-friendly accommodations.

Currently hotels are offered quite a few certification opportunities but I believe that the commitment to strive for a nationally recognized certification is paramount. Hotels that meet a required set of standards further eliminate the traveler’s confusion when it comes to whom to trust and how to know which property best represents the values they hold so dear.

Although the United States Green Building Council does not have a LEED for Hospitality Program in place, its current LEED for Existing Buildings Certification has been created to include the hospitality sector. Hotels can use this program to help improve any property regardless of where they stand now.

It may not be easy, but it is necessary. It is not about “getting a green label on every building”; it’s about continuing to excel, the proactive engagement of all industries and the empowerment that comes along with knowing we are all doing the best thing for the planet.

As more and more hotels begin to incorporate green practices in their daily operations, the hospitality industry continues to embrace the understanding that it has the power to be a huge force of positive change when it comes to creating a more sustainable corporate culture.

Editor’s note: Anne Carmack is Director of Environmental Practices at The Ambrose Hotel, an upscale green hotel in Santa Monica, California.

The views expressed above are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent The Element Agency. If you are interested in penning guest posts for My Green Element, please email Stefan Deeran via stefan@theelementagency.com.

It must be that the concept of ‘two birds with one stone’ is so enticing to people that you can win over just about anyone with it.

The two birds I am talking about are so-called green collar jobs and limiting greenhouse gases.

John McCain is jumping around the campaign trail talking up the environment and jobs. Otherwise hostile crowds (read conservative) seem swayed when green jobs are brought up. I am happy that anti-environment crowds are coming around, and I do think the jobs of tomorrow will be in the new energy sectors and the consequential spin off of general investment in R&D. Either way the idea of green jobs is getting tons of play in the MSM, from msnbc to the New York Times.

By Robert Anton at The Element Agency in Vancouver

Congratulations to groovygreen on two million page views.

Where is Carl Hiaasen when you need him. The everglades are dying and some weird criminals need to pay. via grist.

New Zealand as three million people, this is only about the 1 500 000th weirdest house down there. Inhabitat always as the goods.

Why do Conservatives think they have to ’steal’ the environment issue. Liberals have been trying to give it away for years, here have it take, let’s get it done. That said I love Terra Rossa and this post has a grain of truth to this pro-business tree hugger.

Green Blog has the goods on Swedish trains.

As I mentioned yesterday, go green: make money. Ecopreneurist shows you how.

Have an good Memorial Day American friends,

By Robert Anton at The Element Agency in Vancouver

One difficult aspect of messaging green is what everyone knows but no one cares about. Use less water? cheaper. Use less electricity? cheaper. Drive less? cheaper. It is a near universal truth.

So then why aren’t people scrambling to out do their neighbors with conservation. I think there is some weird iconoclastic aspect of individuals that makes them disregard financial incentives (at least of this scale) and say something like “well I like my SUV, it makes me feel safe, so I’m willing to spend a little more”.

This reasoning drives me a little insane, because despite the total factual error, the moral vaccuity and narcissism it is fundamentally hard to argue with: one is entitled to make their own choices in life.

Which is where business comes in. I always disagreed with my anti business friends in the ENGO world, I always posited that business were the key. Why? because the are so wonderfully predictable. A stupid hummer driver is quite clearly irrational, the investment bank he or she might work for isn’t.

Which is where this New York Times article comes in. The tech sector draws a lot of wattage to run giant servers. “We estimate something like 6 million servers have been virtualized since we started with VMware,” CEO Diane Greene said. “We’ve saved approximately the … power that Denmark uses in a year.”

Don’t you love that cold hard reasoning leading to great results. A little further down the article a Virgin Mobile exec says when they tried to introduce recycled packaging no one bought the phone because it ‘looked cheap’. Who would’ve thought the corporate world would save the rainforests.

By Robert Anton of The Element Agency in Vancouver

Sometimes in this crazy dance of environmentalists and corporations(see the comments), the wooing and the push-back, it can sometimes be overlooked that the good is the enemy of the better. Example: the new Tahoe hybrid being labeled environmental car of the year.

It is important to resist the urge to pat the head of corporations that make some effort. Clearly the Tahoe is not the environmental car of the year. It can be commended for making strides, greener than yesterday is good (and should be pursued), but it still isn’t green.

The nefarious side of all this is that some companies are looking for the cheap pat on the head, often so that they can market themselves as green, this is a the classic give them an inch, they take a mile albeit dressed up as a greenwash. Let’s not fall into their nonsense.

By Robert Anton of The Element Agency in Vancouver

Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer recently argued that ethanol is not having an effect on rising food prices and U.S. biofuel mandates should not be eliminated. The Bush Administration is also arguing that only 3 percent of the more than 40 percent increase in world food prices last year is due to demand for corn for ethanol use.

But there is revolt in the Republican party. 24 senators, led by John McCain, are pushing the EPA to not enforce the Renewable Fuel Standards that are part of last December’s Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (H.R. 6).

Sen. John McCain said in a statement that “This subsidized (ethanol) program — paid for by taxpayer dollars — has contributed to pain at the cash register, at the dining room table, and a devastating food crisis throughout the world.”

According to the law, the EPA must

“promulgate regulations ensuring that applicable volumes of renewable fuel are sold or introduced into commerce in the United States annually.”

That means targets of 9 billion gallons of biofuels in 2008 with a goal of 36 billion gallons in 2022. Currently most of the U.S. biofuels are classified as “conventional biofuel,” or corn ethanol. Non-corn ethanol is classified as either advanced biofuels or cellulosic biofuels. If you are interested in the distinctions, please check the Renewable Fuels Associations site here.

Barack Obama has not explicitly denounced corn ethanol yet, but his website suggests he favors cellulosic biofuels:

“Obama will invest federal resources, including tax incentives, cash prizes and government contracts into developing the most promising technologies with the goal of getting the first two billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol into the system by 2013.”

By Stefan Deeran at The Element Agency in New York

By Sam Fleitman of SoftLayer Technologies

The growth in energy demanded by, and used in, IT environments is a well documented phenomenon. Datacenters are using more energy as CPUs get faster, hard drives become larger, and end user demand for access to data and applications continues to increase. Prices for the underlying hardware and services continue to fall, which just fuels more demand.

Datacenter operators have done their best to maximize the use of every available asset within a facility in order to operate highly efficient environments. Much of the emphasis to date has been on proper datacenter alignment: hot-aisle/cold-aisle configurations, blanking panels to cover gaps in server racks, and sealing holes under raised floors to better contain cold air have become common place in the data center.

However, in most large organizations, there many areas that needs more attention. Departments within a large company often have competing goals that negate green IT efforts. One example of this would be –

• The system administrators and developers want the biggest, fastest machines they can get with the most expandability. This enables them to add memory or hard drives as utilization increases – which makes their jobs much easier to perform and helps them better maintain customer SLAs.
• The purchasing (and finance) department’s primary goal is to save money. The focus is to work with the vendors to reduce the overall hardware cost.

The disconnect between those two departments will often leave the datacenter manager out in the heat (definitely not “out in the cold”). That person’s job essentially becomes “just find a place to put it” until the datacenter is full enough that the answer becomes “no more”. It then becomes a “fix it now” problem as the company struggles with plans to build more datacenter space. So, the problem is a short term view (meeting quarterly earnings results) versus long term direction (to achieve a sustainable and efficient operations environment that may have a short term cost implication).

What should happen is that the disparate groups need to work together throughout the entire planning process. The purchasing department, the system administrators, developers, and the datacenter managers should build a common plan and set realistic expectations in order to optimize the IT infrastructure required and to best meet business, operations, and efficiency objectives.

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One of the great website out there EcoGeek, has caught wind of IBM’s great innovation to bring solar power to under $2 a watt by maximizing the amount of sunlight hitting the photovoltaic cell. They explain it better than I.

We got three big weeks ahead of us. It’s wedding season, kid!

Treehugger has a way to make Friday nights go green too. Sustainable hooch.

We here at my green element did a post awhile back about Planet Green the new Discovery Channel project. Here is little story about their premiere.

Littering in pretty high on the list of horrible things, so I concur with Sustainablog.

By Robert Anton at The Element Agency in Vancouver

Every once in awhile on the internet you get these too good to be true stories. But sometimes you gotta post it in the off chance there is something too this, then you can be the person that let everyone else know.

This time it is a story about an Israeli Scientist who has invented a process to turn CO2 emissions into a fuel using algae.

Do I understand what algae is and how it works? yes. Do I understand this? no.

But here is a link, educate me, let us know what you think.

By Robert Anton at The Element Agency in Vancouver