Climate Technology

How to find a job in your local area

I’ve been on the road. I started the first week in October at the University of Michigan and ended it at a “career visioning” retreat in the Connecticut woods with […]

Major car-sharing companies will merge

Major car-sharing companies Flexcar and Zipcar announced yesterday that they plan to merge. Zipcar, the larger of the two, has had strong growth mainly in large cities on the East […]

Manufacturing a new economy

If we eat food from local sources, we can decrease our ecological footprint, reduce carbon emissions, and eat better food. In addition, any society that cannot produce its own food is vulnerable, as it cannot create one of society's main sources of wealth. It just makes sense to grow food locally.

The same principles apply to manufacturing. Grow locally, eat locally; more generally, consume locally, produce locally. In the case of manufacturing, "producing locally" would mean consuming goods that were mostly manufactured within your major metropolitan area, with most of the rest coming from around the country, but certainly not from around the world.

IBM announces new process to reuse, recycle silicon wafers for solar panels

Tech giant IBM announced it has developed a simple new process to recycle the silicon wafers it uses in many of its products. The process extends the silicon wafers’ useful […]

Umbra on corporate holiday cards

Dear Umbra, My company wants to send out holiday cards each year, but I find it wasteful, especially because of the increased transportation load on the post office. What could […]

Trade consultancy: Whole Foods will ‘consolidate supply chains’

Apparently, I’m not the only one who worries about what the Whole Foods-Wild Oats merger will mean for organic-foods suppliers. In a report published by Organic Monitor, a European-based consultancy […]

Forest Stewardship Council will overhaul too-lax rules

Ooh, bummer: The Forest Stewardship Council, trusted certifier of sustainably sourced wood and paper, plans to overhaul its standards after acknowledging that some companies using its label are logging destructively.

On those quotes in Businessweek’s ‘Little Green Lies’

This post is by guest blogger Auden Schendler, executive director for Community and Environmental Responsibility at the Aspen Skiing Company. Named a "Climate Crusader" in Time magazine's 2006 special issue on climate change, Auden once worked for Amory Lovins at the Rocky Mountain Institute. You can read his full bio here. Auden has unique insights into the difficulties of corporate sustainability in the absence of government leadership and a price for carbon.

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Recently, Businessweek covered Aspen Skiing Company's work on emissions reduction as part of an article titled "Little Green Lies." The article has received considerable coverage in the blogosphere because it addresses the gap between rhetoric and reality when it comes to business claims on the environment. Joe asked me if I'd like to clarify that story, and I jumped at the opportunity.

My main point, which probably didn't get across in the article, is that even at a remarkably progressive company like Aspen Skiing Company -- which has strong support from ownership, management, and staff -- cutting CO2 emissions is very difficult. Imagine how hard it must be in most standard businesses that don't have this level of buy-in. This statement may seem obvious, but it cuts against conventional wisdom. Most entities involved in emissions reduction have a stake in saying it's profitable, relatively easy, and sometimes fun. The NGO community makes its living on this perspective. The government needs its own programs to look good. And corporations have a stake in their perceived success as well.

Me in Fast Company

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here, but I’ve got a monthly column on green business in the print edition of Fast Company. I wasn’t sure whether they put it […]

U.S. investors make a killing off of Chinese coal

China’s vast coal industry: Where would we be without it? Cheap Chinese coal keeps consumer-goods prices low, allowing us to consume like mad even as crude-oil prices skyrocket. It’s also […]