Today's blog is posted by guest blogger, Ed Marshall, a senior account manager at Beaupre. Check out his bio in our "About Authors" section.

Staying on the military-meets-renewable-energy theme that my colleague Mike touched on, I felt compelled to offer a quick, if rather frustrating, update on a post I did at the end of last year. That post looked at the US Navy’s plans to deploy a “green fleet” in the Pacific this summer; green in the sense that it would be powered by a 50-50 blend of fossil and biofuel.

To fuel the green fleet’s cruise, the Navy contracted with a company out of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and broke out the checkbook to pay a per-gallon biodiesel price substantially above the price for fossil-based diesel. At the time I wrote of this arrangement:

And progress often comes at a price above the going market rate. So thank goodness the Navy understands the threat that reliance on a finite vital resource represents to its way of life (and/or death) and is willing to pay those higher prices as an investment in companies that demonstrate they might have a promising solution.

So the Navy gets it. Congress? Sadly, no. According to recent reports, the House Armed Services Committee, chaired by Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-California), is leading the charge on legislation that would prohibit the Pentagon from purchasing alternative fuels or building their own facilities to create them “if the cost exceeds the cost of traditional fossil fuels used for the same purpose.” Meanwhile over in the Senate, a former Navy airman weighed in to support Buck’s stoppage:

“It’s a job for the Department of Energy, not the Department of Navy,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in an interview. “You shouldn’t be paying $244 per gallon when we are having to retire ships early.”

Of course, efforts by the DOE to push renewables and alternatives haven’t met a warm pachyderm embrace. Fossil fuel is finite. Their cost curve, barring complete global economic meltdown, only points up. Alternatives will be needed.

The US military spends a lot of time war gaming future scenarios and positioning for those most likely to develop. The investment it’s been making in efficiency and alternative energies could rightly be read as a positioning exercise. The move by green opponents in Congress could be seen as a depositioning exercise – for the country.

You're honoring the Earth today. This just in: her reply:

My maternal grandfather was an old-line doctor who said the same thing every time a patient asked him about diets: they’re all gimmicks. The only way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more.

I’m adapting my grandfather’s diet advice to Earth Day. Want to make your morbidly obese environmental footprint into an Earth-friendly hardbody? Then screw planting trees and cleaning beaches on April 22 and do something really hard, especially for an American.

Consume less.

All the conservation areas we build and the light bulbs we replace on Earth Day are spitting in the ocean compared to the good we can do for the planet by buying, using and discarding less. In my grandfather’s parlance, it’s the gimmick of a diet versus the reality of shoving less into your pie hole at the dinner table, tearing yourself away from the flat screen and getting on the bike.

Consider what environmental journalist Marc Gunther discovered by analyzing the most recent sustainability report from Walmart.

Gunther recognized Walmart’s accomplishments in waste reduction, energy conservation, and creating markets for locally grown produce as the substantial progress that they are. Yet in spite of its sustainability accomplishments, Walmart’s CO2 emissions are growing. That’s because of the brand of consumption that Walmart promotes, according to Gunther.

“(Walmart) sells lots of efficient light bulbs and compact laundry detergent,” he writes. “What if it tried to sell more durable clothes and shoes? Or less meat? Or fewer crappy toys?”

Gunther isn’t picking on Walmart and neither am I. Walmart does more in sustainability than most companies. The point is that Walmart is us and we’re Walmart, and we both need to change.

If Walmart (and Target and JC Penney and Sears and Kmart et al) have the market clout to make manufacturers reduce wasteful packaging, then they can also get them to produce more durable products. When they do, it falls to retailers to sell those products at accessible prices instead of charging a premium for clothes that won’t go out of style in one year or appliances that won’t break in five and can’t be fixed. At that point, it’s all of our responsibility to ask ourselves that dreaded question before buying: “do I really need this?”

Senator Gaylord Nelson created Earth Day in 1970 to focus public attention on his era’s most important pollution threats, which were industrial facilities, wastewater systems and internal combustion engines. The environmental legislation of the ‘70s helped turn the tide on those polluters. Now it’s time for us to tackle this generation’s environmental culprits: you, me, Walmart, and our debit cards. Legislation isn’t going to do it this time. It’s up to us.

If you need more convincing about why we need to curb our hyperactive consumption, and you haven’t done it already, go to the post above this one and listen to a birthday message from the Earth Mother herself. The old girl makes a good case for keeping that debit card at parade rest as often as possible. Happy Earth Day 2012!

Today's blog is posted by guest blogger, Ed Marshall, a senior account manager at Beaupre. Check out his bio in our "About Authors" section.

The United States Navy has grand green ambitions. It aims to replace fossil fuels with renewable biofuels in 50 percent of its missions by 2020. In pursuit of that goal, the Navy is planning what is commonly called a demonstration exercise (some might call it a dry run, but the ocean is really wet, so that would probably sound odd) next summer off of Hawaii.

To create a 50-50 mix with fossil fuel for that mission’s planes and ships, the Navy recently placed an order for 450,000 gallons of biofuel with a company called Dynamic Fuels. That company is actually a joint venture between two publicly traded companies - the agribusiness behemoth Tyson Foods and a smaller outfit called Syntroleum Corporation that has specialized in gas to liquids and coal to liquids technologies.

The Dynamic Fuels site says they have a proprietary process in use at a plant, “near Baton Rouge, utilizing its technology to turn animal byproducts such as beef tallow and pork and chicken fat into renewable diesel.” That plant, the site says, may one day be capable of churning out some 75 million gallons of biofuel per year. (Fun fact, the United States uses somewhere in the neighborhood of 140 billion gallons of gasoline per year and about 60 billion gallon of diesel a year.)

So, chicken fat ahoy? No, the Navy order is too big for that. Dynamic Fuels will instead be processing algae-based oil supplied by another company, Solazyme, that the Navy has also bought from - in smaller quantities - in the recent past.

The Navy will pay Dynamic Fuels about $26.60 a gallon for the biodiesel; many times higher than the cost the Navy typically pays for traditional diesel. Some quick math tells us the final order will come to about $12 million. Seems kinda pricey, but according to this story, just last year the Navy paid $242 per gallon for a much smaller biofuel order. So, that’s progress, right?

Yes, yes it is. And progress often comes at a price above the going market rate. So thank goodness the Navy understands the threat that reliance on a finite vital resource represents to its way of life (and/or death) and is willing to pay those higher prices as an investment in companies that demonstrate they might have a promising solution.

 

 

Giant: Be quick. Avoid committee approval. Don’t worry about making it perfect. Have some guts to take chances once in a while. And don’t be malicious – do it in a spirit of fun.

 ...

Looking for a quick yet enriching lunch-hour diversion? Check out these riveting eco-themed commercials chosen as the past decade’s “12 most thought-provoking” by Mother Nature Network, the self-described “green CNN”).

A few observations after viewing the clean dozen:

• Polar bears are the go-to animal for poignancy (my favorite of the bunch).
• We used to be very earnest.
• We lightened up.
• We conflated consumerism and environmentalism (buy a Leaf, Prius or Audi, and you’re saving the world!)
• Irony is okay, if you sprinkle it with touchy-feely moments.
• Peeing in the shower is green. You don’t say.
  

Nothing like cool, refreshing facts to support the desperate hope for a renewable energy revolution.

New investment in green energy was up nearly one-third globally in 2010 to a record US$211 billion. That’s 32 percent above the 2009 level and more than five times that of 2004, says the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

Other facts from UNEP’s new report:

• Wind farms in China and rooftop solar panels in Europe were key drivers in the investment increase.
• China was the world leader in “financial new investment” – i.e., investment in utility-scale renewable projects and equity capital for renewable energy companies. The nation's tally was US$48.9 billion, up 28 percent this year.
• Developing economies (which invested US$72 billion this year) overtook developed ones (US$70 billion) in financial new investment. 
• Investments in small distributed capacity, e.g., rooftop solar, rose 132 percent in Germany to US$34 billion.
• Costs for renewable technologies are falling.
• Wind dominated financial new investment in large-scale renewable energy. 
• Biggest percentage jumps in overall investment were in small-scale projects, up 91 percent to US$60 billion, and in government funded R&D, up 121 percent to US$5.3 billion.

"The finance industry is still recovering from the recent financial crisis," Udo Steffens, president of the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, said in a UNEP news release. "The fact that the industry remains heavily committed to renewables demonstrates its strong belief in the prospects of sustainable energy investments."

So there’s hope. And now facts.

More here. 

Americans want companies to be green, but they’re skeptical.

Most corporations talk a good game about environmental responsibility but don’t make significant changes, say nine in 10 Americans in a recent Gallup survey. Eight in 10 say they’re generally skeptical of corporations promoting themselves as environmentally responsible.

Deserved or not, these are failing grades. They raise the question: How could you make your company more credible on the environment?

Gallup gives us a hint. Of the following five environmental actions companies could take, respondents were asked to select the one or two most important actions:

• conserve energy or use renewable energy sources in their manufacturing and day-to-day operations (74% said one of most important)
• use minimal or environmentally friendly packaging (42% said one of most important)
• reduce the carbon footprint of the product they manufacture (36% said one of most important)
• educate consumers about environmentally friendly products and practices (25% said one of most important)
• provide financial support for environmental causes (16% said one of most important)

There’s a pattern here. The more tangible and immediate the action, the higher its potential to convince. These findings affirm the idea that something you can touch, see and feel – e.g., wind turbines, solar panels, post-consumer cardboard evoked by renewables and green packaging – is more relevant than something that’s abstract – e.g., carbon calculations, education and funding.

Even so, abstractions can certainly be brought down to earth and warmed up.

Say your plant is reducing carbon emissions by a ton. What does that equal in something more tangible, say, car miles driven? Or something more emotional, say, respiratory disease cases averted?

If you send one percent of your revenue to an environmental organization, what is that accomplishing on the ground (e.g., how many trees are getting planted)?

If you’re educating consumers, prove they’re learning something. Why not post a video of a real person in her home happily doing the green thing because you showed her how?

If nothing else, the Gallup survey points up the fact that when it comes to greening your company, Americans are fully prepared for a whitewash. And in this case, actions don’t speak loud enough. You need the right words.

How green can green buildings really be if they kill billions of birds per year? That’s the premise Chicago Tribune’s Sheryl DeVore floated in article last week, citing frightening Audubon Society bird death statistics and linking the avian genocide to more than 33,000 LEED certified buildings whose facades make heavy use of glass.  

A little-known provision in the compromise spending bill signed into law this weekend will help some threatened Recovery Act-funded clean technology projects breathe a sigh of relief and move forward in bringing green jobs to their respective regions.

You’d think that cleantech projects that received loan guarantees, tax breaks and other funding from the DOE would be churning along nicely by now. But an arcane rule in the Energy Policy Act – and how narrowly the DOE interprets it – cast a cold chill on many DOE award recipients.

To put it simply, cleantech companies that receive DOE loan guarantees must first pay a risk-based credit subsidy fee, which can amount to a whopping 20% or more of the loan amount… unless their projects actively generate renewable energy or produce biofuels.

In other words, solar, wind and hydro energy companies get a free pass, while energy efficiency and waste heat recovery companies get stuck holding the bill. Section 1705 of the Energy Policy Act waives subsidy fees for companies that manufacture renewable energy products that generate electricity or thermal energy. The loosely defined criteria in the bill provided the DOE broad flexibility to extend fee relief to many more loan recipients. But they didn’t, and as a result some projects were suddenly in jeopardy.

At a time when the Obama administration is strongly promoting energy efficiency technologies as the fastest, most cost-effective path to U.S. energy independence, this rule is not only counterintuitive, it is economically stifling for many of our most promising new cleantech companies. You can’t float them a loan guarantee, charging them tens of millions in subsidy fees for the “honor,” and then expect them to become the new engines of our green economy. Some award recipients have already withdrawn from the loan program, and countless potential applicants have chosen not to apply for participation in the program.

The good news is that, despite all the cuts to energy efficiency programs in the compromise spending bill, the bad policy was upended.  Thanks to hard-fought negotiations by Minnesota’s legislative delegation in particular, the spending bill now includes terms that allow energy efficiency technology companies to avoid payment of those subsidy fees.

A smart policy rewards – not penalizes – our best entrepreneurial cleantech companies, which are those that will help us reduce reliance on fossil fuels, increase the use of renewable energy, cut carbon emissions and generate urgently needed jobs.

{DISCLOSURE: A Brodeur/Beaupre client benefited from the spending bill provision}