Nov 21, 09
Companies Increase Commitment To Tackling Climate Issues, Report Says
Major corporations in the U.S. have shown an increased willingness to voluntarily reduce their impact on climate change despite a sluggish economy, according to a new scorecard produced by the nonprofit group Climate Counts. Eighty-one of the 90 major companies assessed saw an average increase of 22 percent from last year’s scorecard, with Nike topping the list with a score of 83 out of a possible 100 points. Scores are based on 22-criteria in four general areas: measurement of impact on...
U.S. and China Announce "Positive, Cooperative and Comprehensive" Plan for Collaboration on Clean Energy and Climate Change
"Very exciting day here in Beijing. There's enormous interest in both governments in working together to fight climate change. The package announced today is far-reaching and can make a real difference in cutting emissions." That's an exclusive quote from David Sandalow, DOE's Assistant Secretary of Energy for Policy and International Affairs, who just emailed me from China about the newly announced U.S.-China cooperation plan. Sandalow is going to be in Copenhagen, so I hope to have...
How Carbon Markets Work in the Northeastern US
With all the hand-wringing over the alleged risk of market manipulation in cap and trade, you'd almost forget that the United States already has a carbon cap and trade program up and running. But it does. RGGI, a regional program among 10 Northeast states, has been auctioning permits, allowing trading on a secondary market, and even, in a way, encouraging trading in derivatives. And guess what's happened so far? ...we find no evidence of anticompetitive conduct....
Lifting the Lid on Climate Change Talks
by John Vidal Rich countries bullying poorer ones, mud-slinging and back-stabbing - environmental summits can be vicious. At 8am on Wednesday 7 October, a smartly dressed fiftysomething Filipino woman took the escalator to the first floor of the UN building in Bangkok and merged into a throng of diplomats, civil servants and environmentalists arriving for the eighth day of the ninth session of the global climate talks. She was met with a few respectful nods. Bernarditas de Castro Muller...
CFCM Show and Tell: Making Change
Ryan Toole is designing a platform called Red Ink, a tool designed to enable secure, collective financial action. He points out that there are existing tools – wesabe, mint.com, yodlee – which unify your online financial information. The bleeding edge in this field is financial tools for collective action – carrotmob, groupon, merry miser, buy it like you mean it. Red Ink fits into this latter category. It’s a “social financial platform” designed to let...
Gaming Cap and Trade: Should We Worry?
A look at the evidence - and a path forward. Worries about “gaming” or market manipulation sometimes crop up as an objection to cap and trade, often with reference to recent shenanigans in the financial markets. Some fear that a cap-and-trade system could be manipulated to artificially raise—or lower—permit prices to generate profits for a few at the expense of consumers. While distrust and concerns about scamming a carbon market are understandable, they’re not warranted. To put...
High Entropy? Moi?
When I first came to Tokyo, fashionable parts of the city would be lined with hundreds of heavy taxis sitting in queues with their engines running, for hours on end. Every powered item was always on, 24/7. Tokyo Metropolitan Government has passed a law against idling cars - but this hall of mirrors atrium is a reminder that high entropy Tokyo will not disappear without a struggle. This picture is by way of context for my lecture yesterday at the International Design Symposium which was...
The Revolution Will Not Be Hand-Made: A Quick Sunday-Morning Rant
(A first stab at articulating some ideas. Thoughtful feedback welcome.) We're nearing an inflection point in our discussions about sustainability and building a bright green future. Mainly, this is because we're realizing that our task is larger and more pressing than we thought even a few years ago. It's not enough to be less destructive, to be more sustainable. We need to actually start being non-destructive, being as close to sustainable as we understand how to get. And we need to do it...
Transition Towns or Bright Green Cities?
What can any of us do in the face of planetary catastrophe? Staring into the ecological abyss, it's easy to feel small and unimportant. Edward Abbey wrote truly, "Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul." But it's often hard to see how any actions we might actually take, as individuals, will have any meaningful effect, whatsoever: leaving aside the pablum about small steps and each doing our part, we all know in our hearts that taking out the recycling will not do much to slow the...
On Connecting The Dots - A Response To Lessig On Transparency
Celebrated legal scholar, intellectual property activist and now congressional reformer Lawrence Lessig has written a provocative and somewhat surprising article in this month’s New Republic. Titled “Against Transparency“, the article questions whether a move towards increasing government transparency – as advocated by President Obama as a candidate and by nonprofit groups like the Sunlight Foundation – will lead towards better government or, as he fears,...
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