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Articles by Mark Pawlosky

Mark Pawlosky is a freelance journalist based in Seattle. He is a former editor of Grist.org.

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A review of Joel Makower’s Strategies for the Green Economy

Mark Pawlosky Technology

If there were an M.B.A. school for green executives, Joel Makower undoubtedly would be its dean, historian, and booster-in-chief.

Joel Makower.

During a 20-year career, Makower has chronicled the rise of the green movement in corporate America through books, hundreds of stories, and countless speeches. Along the way, he has carved out a mini green business empire for himself. He is executive editor and chairman of Greener World Media, which owns Greenbiz.com, a website that reports on the burgeoning industry. He also has marketing ties to green business groups and sits on the boards and advisory committees of various green associations and organizations.

The recent explosion in everything green has kept Makower in demand, and that no doubt partly accounts for his absence from the book-writing business. It’s been 14 years since his last book, but that dry spell came to an end earlier this year with the publication of Strategies for the Green Economy — a blend of cautionary tales and how-to’s for business leaders contemplating a green battle plan.

Strategies for the Green Economy, by Joe... Read more

Mark Pawlosky Technology

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  • Green, Inc. author says big environmental groups have sold out to big business

    For my money, there’s nothing more delicious than a book that lays bare the rot of a corrupted industry from an insider’s perspective. In the hands of a skilled observer, […]

    Mark Pawlosky Technology

  • A chat with Philip V. Adams of the World Green Exchange auction system

    Last week, World Energy Exchange, an online energy trading platform, officially launched a new marketplace for renewable-energy certificates and greenhouse-gas permits. The World Green Exchange employs an auction system -- think eBay -- to bring buyers and sellers together. In theory, auctions create a more transparent marketplace and drive out cost inefficiencies by directly connecting the buyer and seller and removing the middleman.

    Philip V. Adams
    Philip V. Adams.

    We caught up with World Energy President and COO Philip V. Adams last week to find out how the launch went and why he thinks WGE will stand out in an increasingly crowded field dominated by the Chicago Climate Exchange in the U.S. and European Climate Exchange and European Energy Exchange overseas.

    Grist: Congratulations on launching the World Green Exchange. I know it's only been up and running for a couple of days, but is it attracting users and working as you had hoped so far? How will you measure success longer term?

    Adams: Thank you. The World Green Exchange was formally launched last week, but in fact we have been conducting transactions on the platform for the past several months. We're a bit of a conservative firm, and took the view that we would have real client success in the marketplace before making an announcement of our capabilities. As we suspected, the auction approach is performing very well. In several transactions conducted to date, we have significantly bettered benchmark prices that were derived to our clients who were using brokers or bid-ask exchanges.

    Mark Pawlosky Technology

  • Another day, another trillion dollars for the clean-tech industry

    It seems that a day doesn't slip by without someone raising the stakes in the alternative-energy poker game.

    The most recent bombshell wager: Cambridge Energy Research Associates report that alternative energy investments will -- hold on to your hats! -- top $7 trillion by 2030. That's an audacious number by any measure, and normally it would be enough to suck the oxygen right out of a convention of wind-farm enthusiasts. But that's not the half of it. The most startling aspect of the report is that it barely raised a ripple in the investment community.

    And why should it?

    Mark Pawlosky Technology