Green Technology Forum

Last night I took part in a session on the Indy GreenPrint initiative in Indianapolis. I learned a lot about city government, how far we have to go in energy efficiency and conservation, and how eager many citizens and administrators are to get there.

For example, Tim Method, Environmental Coordinator for Indy’s Department of Public works, explained that half of the city’s energy expenditures are for sewage treatment. And when we get a good rain, which happens about fifty times a year, raw sewage overflows into our creeks and rivers. Fortunately, the city plans to spend almost $2 billion over the next twenty years to fix that problem.

But what can emerging technologies like nanotechnology and biotechnology do to help green our cities? Nanotechnology is advancing water treatment significantly, and one Australian city is even using methane from wastewater to power a treatment plant. Advances in nano-solar cell technology could also enhance programs like Indianapolis Power and Light’s Green Power Option, which allows customers to specify an amount up to 100 percent of their monthly electricity to be generated by environmentally friendly, renewable resources.

I’m looking forward to helping make Indy GreenPrints a reality and introducing environmentally friendly and energy-saving nanotechnologies and biotechnologies where appropriate.

What if we make an all-out, global effort to slow global climate change. How long will it be before we see signs of improvement? Months? Years? Most experts believe it will be decades before our efforts to slow climate change will result in measurable changes at the global scale. After all, the causes of global climate change—increased carbon emissions, deforestation, overpopulation—have been at work for over two centuries, and we’re just now seeing their effects at the global scale.

But how will societies accustomed to quick fixes and instant gratification cope with the time lag between today’s efforts to slow global climate and the visible results of those efforts decades from now? My fear is that, in the absence of quick improvements, some may lose interest and simply stop making the effort.

And let’s face it, our global environmental predicament is going to get worse before it gets better. That’s just the way causes and effects work at the global scale. We have only now begun to turn the ship and begin correcting the habits that have led to the current global condition. Even with the current popularity of all things green in the U.S. and Western Europe, we’re only talking about slowing the rate of increase in carbon emissions, deforestation, overpopulation, and other causes of global climate change. Nobody is talking about reducing them.

Until the effects of today’s efforts roll up into measurable improvements in the global ecosystem, who will have the heart to stay the course? Who will keep pushing to reduce carbon emissions as the effects of global climate change worsen over the next several decades? Politicians? Unfortunately, our political system, in the U.S. at least, seems to reward short-term thinking. Green politics may be a hot topic today, but how many politicians will continue to push for environmental reform when its popularity fades in favor of the next big thing?

Businesses can sometimes be equally short-sighted. We’ve all seen the placards in hotel rooms touting the management’s environmental awareness as they ask us to reuse our dirty towels and bedding. But their conscience too often stops at this one gimmick, which just happens to save them money. Will businesses push to find new ways to reduce global climate change if consumers stop demanding green products and services?

Will scientists search for new insights and evidence to fight global warming if it no longer means big grants and research contracts? Will even the non-governmental organizations often labeled environmentalists move on to other environmental challenges if donors lose interest in the issue of global climate change.

The answer is that it’s up to each one of us to stay focused even as our global environmental predicament seems to worsen over the coming decades. Fortunately, if we continue our efforts to slow global climate change, there will be smaller victories that may sustain us. Reduced rates of extinction, habitat loss, deforestation and soil erosion can all make a dramatic difference at the local scale. These local victories will eventually add up to global effects. And if you need inspiration as we set out on the long road to a greener world, I offer this story:

“One day during his tenure of office as Administrator of Morocco, at the turn of the century, Lyautey, the famous Marshal of France, was riding through a forest when he came to a spot where a storm had uprooted some giant cedars, leaving large empty spaces in the grove. Lyautey called to his side the Director of Forestry who, with other officials, was accompanying him on his tour of inspection. ‘Look here,’ said Lyautey, ‘you will have to plant new cedars here.’ The Director of Forestry smiled. ‘Plant new cedars, sir? But it takes two thousand years to grow one of these trees.’ For a brief minute Lyautey looked surprised. ‘Two thousand years?’ he exclaimed. ‘Two thousand years? Well, then–we must plant them at once.’”

Maybe rising ocean levels lapping at the front door of the White House would finally get the message across to the President that global climate change is for real. By the end of this century, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, sea levels could rise between 7 and 23 inches as a result of global warming. A rise of 1 meter, the minimum measurable at Flood Maps, shows most of the White House grounds underwater. Maybe the prospect of paddling over to Capitol Hill will inspire the President to act on global climate change before the White House becomes beachfront property.

In an article in this week’s Newsweek International entitled, Green Is as Green Does, Jeffrey Garten, a professor at the Yale School of Management, finds corporate actions to reduce emissions at odds with Wall Street’s show-me-the-money-now ethos.

According to Garten, green initiatives like A Call to Action pushed by a coalition of companies including DuPont, Duke Energy and Alcoa are “less leadership than self-defense.”

“These coalitions will not last,” he contends, “because industries such as oil, autos and agriculture companies will soon be at one another’s throats vying for tax breaks and subsidies.”

Shareholders will also inhibit progress, he says, noting that, “last year, the tyranny of quarterly earnings reports was cited by 76 percent of a Business Roundtable sample of CEOs as a great inhibition to research and other activities necessary to create value for the long term.”

But the notion that companies banding together to press for comprehensive green policy from the federal government will soon be at one another’s throats or that the tyranny of quarterly earnings will crush their efforts is speculation on Garten’s part. Garten himself points out that General Electric plans to expand research on green technology from $700 million in 2005 to $1.5 billion by 2010, and that a group of pension funds with at least $200 billion in assets has just put Exxon, Wells Fargo and several others on a blacklist for substandard environmental efforts.

But he’s right when he says, “companies will have to demonstrate how their environmental policies create shareholder value in the short term as well as the long.” And that may be where nanotechnology and biotechnology can make a difference. The responsible use of nanotechnology and biotechnology can help bridge the gap between long-term good and short-term gain.

Let’s not forget that President Bush has called for reducing gasoline usage in the US by 20 percent in the next 10 years, requiring 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels in 2017. Other lawmakers have been even more aggressive, as in the case of HR 969, the bill introduced to the US Senate last month that would require utilities to generate 20 percent of their electricity from renewable resources such as solar, wind, geothermal and crops by 2020.

Regulations like these will put intense economic pressure on corporations to meet stringent green goals, and force them to implement technologies that satisfy those goals along with short-term economic gains.

Numerous sources, including the United Nations Global Environmental Outlook Yearbook 2007, agree that nanotechnology has the potential to deliver great environmental benefits both in production processes and in products.

“The use of nanomaterials to increase energy efficiency represents a major global opportunity,” adds Cientifica research director Hailing Yu in an article in last week’s IndustryWeek entitled Nanotechnology For Sustainability. Biotechnology offers similar promise through biofuels, as former congressman Jim Greenwood, President of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, said in an interview this week with Green Technology Forum.

Garten says that U.S. firms worry that European companies, under stricter regulatory pressure from the EU, will gain a competitive advantage when the world eventually adopts tougher approaches to climate change. He also believes few U.S. firms will figure out how to make being green a tangible competitive advantage. That’s where a research and advising firm like Green Technology Forum can help. We’re here to help corporate leaders take advantage of the benefits of responsible nano- and biotechnology, and to help them understand their risks. We can help you achieve your long-term green goals as conscientious corporate citizens while meeting shareholders’ and customers’ increasing calls for green processes and products and regulators’ increasingly stringent environmental requirements.

The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, released Oct. 30, 2006, warned that failing to act on global climate change could risk future economic damages equivalent to a reduction of up to 20 percent in global gross domestic product (GDP). To focus on the US economy, with a GDP of $12.3 trillion per year, climate change-induced loss could reach almost $2.5 trillion per year.

We often hear about what a disproportionate amount of the world’s resources the US consumes and our equally disproportionate contribution to global climate change. But there is an upside to our superabundant economy – we also contribute one third of the world’s GDP. If we were to accept the Stern Review’s recommendation and invest 1 percent of that in solving our global climate change problems, we’d be spending $24.6 billion per year.

That sounds like a huge investment, but if the report is right and failing to act could lead to losses of almost $2.5 trillion per year, it starts to look like a pretty wise one. When we add the environmental and human health benefits it looks even better.

What effect would an annual investment of $25 billion to fight climate change have on our economy? Where would the money go? Green technology was the darling of the 2006 US economy, exceeding 2005 investment by 78% as venture capitalists put $2.9 billion into technologies related to energy generation, storage, transportation, recycling and waste.

That upward trend reverses a long slide in green tech funding. Federal spending on energy technologies, for example, fell from an inflation-adjusted peak of $7.7 billion in 1979 to just $3 billion in the 2007 budget. Military spending, in contrast, went up 260% to $75 billion a year over that time period.

Now the pendulum is swinging back toward increased federal spending. George W. Bush in 2007 became the first US president to address global climate change in a state of the union address, calling on the country to diversify its energy supply, change the way America generates electric power, make greater use of solar and wind energy, press on with battery research for plug-in and hybrid vehicles, expand the use of clean diesel vehicles and biodiesel fuel, and continue investing in new methods of producing ethanol.

Specific targets include reducing gasoline usage in the US by 20 percent in the next 10 years, in part by setting a mandatory fuels standard requiring 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels in 2017.

Other lawmakers have been even more aggressive. A federal renewable portfolio standard bill, HR 969, introduced to the US Senate in February 2007 by Rep. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), would mandate renewable energy. The bill would require utilities to generate 20 percent of their electricity from renewable resources such as solar, wind, geothermal and crops by 2020.

In upcoming posts I’ll look at the opportunities that facing up to global climate change have to offer, and how nanotechnology and biotechnology are moving to meet them.