CleanSpeak - News

Export Land Model - the Saudi update

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 11:32:00-0400

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.

A quick update on the export land issue that I blogged about previously. In short, the problem is petroleum-producing countries becoming wealthy exporting oil and then finding their rising domestic oil use significantly cutting into what’s available for export even as their oil fields become less productive due to age. The ramifications are manifold – from unrest at home as shrinking revenues reduce subsidies and push up prices on things like food and gasoline, to turmoil on international markets as shrinking surplus capacity makes it easier for traders to drive price swings through speculation.

With this in mind, a few recent stories involving Saudi Arabia caught my eye. The first is a pretty straightforward endorsement of the export land model theory. In this story, Abdel Salam al-Yamani, head of the Saudi Electricity Company, is quoted as saying that, if left unchecked, Saudi Arabia’s current domestic oil consumption rates will deplete the country’s reserves by 2030. The second story involves the Saudi’s ramping up a nuclear energy program to the tune of at least $100 billion dollars. This story on the Saudi oil export and energy issue in the Wall Street Journal has a nice graph charting rising Saudi oil consumption. Finally, this story pulls in the previous points and also notes that the Saudi’s are going full bore into an energy source they’re likely to have in abundance for a long time to come: solar. Who knows, maybe one day they’ll be exporting that energy, too. In the meantime, the Middle East, in general, seems interested in conservation to ensure exports of their main revenue source remains high.

Global investors pour money into green energy

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 14:24:00-0400

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.

'Don't call it global warming. Call it climate change'

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 09:25:00-0400

I’ve always thought this admonition a little pedantic, a cheap, phony way to separate those who supposedly truly care about the planet from those who like to speak plainly. I mean, it’s not as if the planet isn’t warming.

But I’m rethinking this. A new study out of the University of Michigan proves the words really matter. For some reason, more Americans buy into the reality of climate change than global warming.

Online survey respondents were asked the following question, of which there were two versions as indicated:

"You may have heard about the idea that the world's temperature may have been going up [changing] over the past 100 years, a phenomenon sometimes called 'global warming' ['climate change']. What is your personal opinion regarding whether or not this has been happening?”

When referred to as climate change, 74 percent thought the problem was real.

When referred to as global warming, only 68 percent thought it was real.

Global warming’s tight conceptual linkage to temperature might be one reason for the disparity, a study author said, since “an unusually cold day may increase doubts about global warming more than about climate change.”

Researchers also found a dramatic difference in answers depending on political affiliation. On the Republican side, 60 percent said they think climate change is real, though only 44 percent said they believe in global warming. About 86 percent of Democrats thought climate change was serious no matter what it was called.

The US Environmental Protection Agency uses the more credible term. Google global warming and, though you get 32 million results, the third result is “Climate Change |US EPA.”

Climate not changing? Tell it to tsunami victims

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 15:31:00-0400

There’s nothing a climate change denier likes better than a good cold winter. “Hey, how’s that global warming working for you,” they’ll chortle as the sides of your nose freeze together in the latest Arctic blast.

Photo credit: NYDailyNews Kyodo/AP

First of all it’s not global warming, it’s climate change, and the changes are coming faster and faster with each passing year. If you want to know how “well” it’s working, take a look at what the earthquake and tsunami did in Japan the other day. The early death toll was 350, with more expected. More than 500 people are still missing, 1,800 homes have been damaged or destroyed, billions of dollars worth of property lost. The earthquake the caused the tsunami was 8,000 times stronger than the quake that leveled vast areas of Christchurch, New Zealand, just a few weeks ago

It was just seven years ago that an Indian Ocean tsunami killed an estimated 150,000 people. See a pattern here? Extreme environmental events are on the rise. The most damaging tsunami on record before 2004 was the one that killed an estimated 40,000 people in 1782 following an earthquake in the South China Sea. There were a few more significant tsunamis before 2004, but they were spaced decades apart. In 1883 some 36,500 people were killed by tsunamis in the South Java Sea, following the eruption of Indonesia's Krakatoa volcano. In northern Chile more than 25,000 people were killed by a tsunami in 1868.

The Davos, Switzerland-based Global Risk Forum specializes in identifying risks of any kind to society. The group’s president, Walter Amman is convinced that climate change will lead to more disasters due to extreme weather. He told German’s Deutsche Welle that he believes that we no longer can or should argue that we merely register events more quickly and accurately than 20 years ago. “If you look at the number of those events over the last 10 years, then it is clear that they have increased in number,” he said.

Some people won’t believe the climate is changing until they see a polar bear raiding their backyard bird feeder. Hopefully, however, the majority will take events like the tsunami to heart and realize that things they do every day – what they buy, drive, burn, throw away – have a bearing on the life of the planet and everyone on it.

'I've been working on the turbine, all the live-long day ...'

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 15:27:00-0400

A study that came out of Germany this week theorized that investments in renewable energy could pump as much as 600 billion euros into the European Union’s economies. The study, by Germany’s Institute for Climate Impact Research, forecasts a construction boom as owners retrofit homes and businesses to cut their energy costs, and as electrical utilities upgrade their existing grids into efficient “smart” grids.

So naturally, that made me think of railroads. Let me explain how the playpen of free association in my mind arrived at that comparison.

The railroads were the first quantum leap from colonial to modern America. Pre-railroad, the U.S. population huddled around harbors and rivers and lakes because they were the best means of transporting goods over long distances. Most of the American interior might as well have been Venus for all the good it was doing us. The massive agricultural plains of the Midwest were so far from major markets that it didn’t make economic sense to cultivate them on a large scale. There was no way to get the product to market. Then along came the railroads, and all of a sudden those empty acres in Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, the Dakotas et al were a treasure trove. The railroads sparked one of the greatest economic expansions in history. As historian Chris Butler puts it on his site “The Flow of History,” “By 1900, railroads had virtually revolutionized overland transportation and travel, pulling whole continents tightly together (both economically and politically), helping create a higher standard of living, the modern consumer society, and a proliferation of new technologies. Although airplanes and automobiles would continue this revolution, it was the railroad that paved the way.”

The U.S. government subsidized railroad growth with land grants and military protection. It could have the same role in developing the renewable energy economy. Today, Congress and the White House are debating how much to support renewable energy economy’s development. President Obama put $16.8 billion for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development into the 2008 recovery act. Deficit-conscious legislators in the House of Representatives want to scale that back.

The question is whether federal renewable energy spending is a drag on the economy (through deficits) or a growth path, as the German study suggests. The study’s author, Carlo Jaeger, doesn’t mince words.

“What we are showing here is that by credibly engaging in the transition to a low-carbon economy through the adoption of an ambitious target and adequate policies, Europe will find itself in a win-win situation of increasing economic growth while reducing greenhouse gases,” he writes.

What do you think? Is clean energy investment the next railroad, or interstate highway system, or Internet? Or is it just another debt to be paid off by the next generation?

Mother Nature has gone off message

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 13:26:00-0400

Forty-nine of our 50 states have snow on the ground – even Hawaii, says CNN – and we in the Northeast are getting dumped on. We’ve got official emergency declarations, National Guard activations, power outages, car crashes, flight cancellations and closings of just about every kind of operation that has a choice. It’s hard to worry about global warming today.

But just in case you were out shoveling and missed it:

Last year was the world’s warmest on record, tied with 2005, NOAA reported today. Twenty-ten was the 34^th consecutive year with global temperatures above the 20^th century average.

We (or rather our descendants) are going to be living for the next 1,000 years with the adverse effects of the CO2 we’ve already generated – even if we could somehow halt fossil fuel use today. That's according to a study just published in Nature Geoscience.

So if you go outside today, bundle up – and pray for a way to stay cool.

We care less about the climate

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 13:52:00-0400

Or so it seems. As the planet heats up, global media coverage of the climate is down. Journalists published 23,156 climate-related stories in English last year, down 30 percent from 2009’s count, according to DailyClimate.org.

The new UN climate agreement in Cancun was largely ignored, at least compared with the 2009 edition in Copenhagen. That’s the one that brought us the Climategate scandal, which set carbon consciousness back decades. Daily Climate says the December 2010 Cancun conference got a mere 10 seconds of airtime on the major network news.

The public just doesn’t seem to care like it used to. Or is it the media?

One thing stifling effective climate coverage is newsroom “tyrannies,” including those of limited time and space, of balance, and of the required “peg” or hook to justify a story’s urgency, says New York Times Dot Earth blogger Andrew Revkin.

'Bo-ho-ho-ring'

There’s another tyranny, adds a Dot Earth commenter: The Tyranny of Boredom. “What about the simple fact that climate is quite possibly the most boring subject the science world has ever had to present to the public?” Randy Olson asks. “This stuff is bo-ho-ho-ring.”

If boring, it’s also complex. Consider the fact that December 2010 was the United Kingdom’s coldest since nationwide records began in 1910, and it was central England’s second coldest December since 1659. Now that’s a news hook. But being of the man-bites-dog variety, it muddies the waters, undermining the general understanding that global temperatures are, in fact, trending up.

(Eco-jargon compounds the boredom, complexity and confusion. Sustainability, for example,is one of Advertising Age’s top 10 “jargoniest” pieces of jargon in 2010. "The term is a good concept gone bad by mis- and overuse. It's come to be a squishy, feel-good catchall for doing the right thing.”)

In all of these cases, the “right” side of the argument is simply drowned out. A wind power company in the UK notes that 66 percent of survey respondents living near its controversial project actually support its proposed massive turbines while only 12 percent oppose them. But you’d never know it. Said the wind power company’s CEO, “We see this too often, the small loud minority being mistaken for the voice of the people.” (via Treehugger)

A new communications weapon

Concerned climate environmentalists and scientists are hoping to penetrate the ennui and reignite passion for their cause through “mind bombs,” writes Der Spiegel’s Axel Bjanowski. Mind bombs distill a cause into a highly emotional image, such as Greenpeace’s famous bleeding whale (image above), and drive a core message home. But photos of polar bears on ice, violent storms, turbines, or hockey stick graphs have been mind duds. They just aren’t working.

Other new communications strategies might include:

Sexy ads, e.g., a good-looking researcher in a bathing suit in the Arctic
Enlisting scientists to do their own journalism
Thinking smaller, i.e., focusing on a single, discrete facet of the climate problem and engaging a target audience to act
Anointing a new Al Gore
Establishing dedicated channels and processes for communicating important climate findings. (via Der Spiegel)

My hunch is that climate interest will largely hinge on the mind bombs. Two sets of birds falling from the sky – sad but not climate-related – are insignificant in the great scheme of things, but they generated massive interest this week. Meanwhile, a truly nuclear mind bomb, the BP spill, has an astonishingly short half-life in the public consciousness.

Climate change is the most important question of our generation: How can we amplify the silent ticking of the most devastating bomb of all, so that we compel the world to disarm it?

Green Launching Pad innovates state-level clean energy branding

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:01:00-0400

One of the more innovative collaborations between a higher education institution, statewide and federal government is unfolding in New Hampshire... Read more.

A greener alternative to ethanol? I'll drink to that!

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 15:29:00-0400

Today’s blog is posted by guest blogger, Ed Marshall, a Senior Account Manager at Beaupre.

Following up on my co-generation/ symbiosis post from earlier this summer, I came across a great example of this principle in action the other day. This story explains how scientists at Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland have developed a way to turn two byproducts of whiskey production into a more-than-viable alternative to corn ethanol. Treading on stereotypes for a moment, I have to say this sort of discovery would seem destined to have been made by a Scottish or Irish scientist.

The article explains that the biofuel made from the byproducts, butanol, packs 30 percent more energy per unit than does ethanol, can be easily blended into gasoline at refineries, requires no modification to engines that use the blended fuel and does not pick up water, making it far easier to handle and use than the hydrophilic ethanol. This is all terrific, and from a symbiosis standpoint, the really good news is that it’s derived from a waste product created by a useful, needed, everyday manufacturing activity.

Truth be told, this isn’t the first time I’ve come across this sort of useful byproduct in distilling. CNET’s Martin LaMonica covered a story last year wherein Sierra Nevada Brewing entered into a partnership to turn its beer making leftovers into a feedstock for a home ethanol start-up. Out on the road, distilling byproducts are already helping save money while improving safety. Read all the way to the bottom of this Wall Street Journal article from 2009 and you’ll see that leftovers from the rum-making process are an effective supplement to road salt.

So while drinking and driving don’t mix, distilling and driving may be a rather different story.

Posted by: Ed Marshall

How many earths do you require?

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 12:14:00-0400

Eco science can boggle the mind, and it’s easy to drown in the data. Unless we can see, smell or feel an environmental threat, we tend to ignore it. So if you want to make a memorable point, dumb it down. Way down.

That’s what TreeHugger.com and the Global Footprint Network (GFN) have done with respect to natural resource consumption. Here, for example, is an environmental data point anyone can grasp:

If every human consumed natural resources like an American, we’d need five planet earths to support us.

Pretty simple way to represent complex information, isn’t it? The Global Footprint Network chart documents the fact that we, as a country and planet, consume more natural resources than the earth replenishes and generate waste faster than the planet can absorb it. The chart considers energy production, settlement, timber & paper harvest, food & fiber and seafood. It’s backed up by more data than any of us care to examine here.

The bottom line is we have a natural resources deficit. Having considered that, GFN, in another example of dumbing-down genius, declares that…

August 21 is Earth Overshoot Day.

That’s the day when we humans have used up the planet’s annual supply of resources. If you pretend we get a fresh start every Jan. 1, then August 21 is the day we go into deficit spending of our natural capital. If we were prevented from borrowing against the planet’s future, we’d run out of resources on that day. As consumption soars, Earth Overshoot Day comes earlier every year. Last year, it was Sept. 25.

Now that we know the day, do we know the solution to over-consumption? Well, that’s hard to dumb down. In addition to conventional sustainability measures, TreeHugger.com blogger Matthew McDermott

CALCULATE YOUR ECO FOOTPRINT

recommends “radically reassessing how much stuff we believe is required for our happiness. Rejiggering what we believe to be needs and not just wants.”

He’s not alone. In fact, a minimalist trend is already under way, says the BBC, starting with young American urbanites digitizing their books and music and shedding large swaths of possessions, including homes.

That’s sounds smart.

And so does this personal ecological footprint calculator. Try it, and tell us how many planet earths you need to support your lifestyle. (I’d need 4.6. Ouch!)

A new selling point for renewable energy, courtesy of two former colonial powers

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 16:42:00-0400

The New York Times’ front-page article on Portugal’s clean energy makeover is a must-read for anyone interested in sustainability. This warts-and-all profile of a small nation’s push to build a significant renewable energy economy is a big confidence booster if the sight of oil-soaked pelicans in the Gulf of Mexico has you down.

The short version is that Portugal and a handful of other small nations are way ahead in kicking the fossil fuel habit. Almost 45 percent of the electricity on Portugal’s national power grid is from renewable resources. Neighboring Spain, which recently opened a cutting-edge solar thermal plant, is having similar success to Portugal. Spain is expected to surpass every country except Portugal and Denmark for renewable energy production by 2025.

Spain and Portugal’s successes – and those of Denmark, Ireland, Iceland, Sweden, etc. – are helping renewable energy shake off a stubborn image consisting of high costs and low reliability. No, it hasn’t been a bed of organically grown roses in Portugal. Some Portuguese citizens have chafed at higher electric rates, but prices are expected to drop after the first generation of facilities is paid off. According to U.S.-based renewable energy consultant Alex Klein, however, the long-term benefits eclipse the short-term costs and extend way beyond economics. “The cost gap will close in the next decade, but what you get right away is an energy supply that is domestically controlled and safer,” Klein told the Times.

Now there’s a message that could even sell with the large swaths of the American public who don’t give a tinker’s damn about the environment – security. The more we rely on oil to power our economy, the less secure we are. Sarah Palin can chant “drill baby drill” until nuclear dawn, but the bald reality is that no amount of domestic drilling is going to get us off the imported oil crack pipe. The U.S. depends on other countries for 66 percent of our annual oil consumption. Every drop of oil under offshore waters or the Arctic National Wildlife refuge wouldn’t make a dent in that kind of demand.

Five, 10 or 20 years from now, when OPEC jacks up oil prices, or a military conflict cuts off the flow of Middle Eastern oil, who’s going to be more secure? The country that gets most of its energy from wind, solar, hydro and biomass, or the country with an IV line of tankers stretching across thousands of miles of ocean? Cue the Portuguese-accented laughter, please.

'Salt' plant and Duke study make solar outlook brighter

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 11:14:00-0400

In Northern New England, where I live, the sun exists only in rumor and faint memory for weeks at a time. So when sustainable energy advocates talk solar, I think of my late-February pallor and mentally check out of the discussion. Long nights, short days of limited sun. Wind for my region maybe, but solar?

Well, yes, actually. Two news items that filtered through the excellent Inhabitat blog recently give hope to anyone who thinks the sun could help wean us off fossil fuels. The first comes from Sicily, where the energy company Enel recently fired up “Archimede” the world’s first utility-scale molten salt power plant. Archimede uses mirror concentrators to super-heat a molten salt solution circulating through a pipe array. The heat pipes power boilers that create steam to drive electrical turbines. The key to this system is that it can store energy for nights and cloudy days, much like the solar thermal systems I blogged about a while back. The combination of sodium nitrates and potassium salts in the system can accumulate heat for extended periods. That ability to ride out nights and cloudy days makes thermal solar more practical for sun-deprived areas like mine. Photovoltaic solar, the more widely known solar technology, generates electricity directly from the sun’s rays instead of through turbines. It’s most often associated with places like the American Southwest, which have weeks on end of uninterrupted sunshine.

But photovoltaic’s geographical limitations were never a technology problem, they were an economic problem. Solar panels work as well on a sunny New England day as they do on a sunny day anywhere else. They just didn’t work often enough to make them economically feasible because solar panels are expensive. Maybe not for much longer, though. Researchers at Duke University just released a study that says solar energy is now cheaper than nuclear energy, partly because the cost of panels is dropping. When it drops enough, it will be economically feasible to mount solar panels on rooftops to power air conditioners during hot summer days, or heat during clear, sunny winter days to reduce oil and coal consumption.

Now if I could just do something about that late February pallor …

Oil fatigue and making ourselves care

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 11:55:00-0400

Who really cares? That’s a vital question, maybe the question, in clean tech communications.

You can sit in a conference room all day hashing out your product positioning, but if you can’t get your audience to feel, you’ll never get them to act.

This truth concerns me from a life-or-death perspective as some of the most concrete, tangible, visible symptoms of our planet’s problems – the things that make us care – are fading away. We, the audience, care just a little less each day.

The BP well has stopped spewing, so the underground oil cam is boring. Tony Hayward has sailed away from the executive suite, taking his $18 million and our anger with him. The oil slick is … well, where the hell has it gone?

Climate change is at least as frustrating as oil fatigue because it’s an abstraction even as it suffocates the planet. Although it’s sweltering here in New England, global warming will seem pretty academic in December. And while the slow implosion of the ocean’s food chain isn’t as jarring as the pothole on your street, ocean warming is being blamed for a 40 percent decrease in the ocean’s algal biomass.

Plastiki gets the art of caring. The sailboat, made of 12,500 reclaimed plastic bottles, just arrived in Sydney after 128 days crossing the Pacific and spotlighting the blight of plastic trash in the ocean. It was an inspired communications gambit that has successfully given compelling physical form to an environmental concern we hardly see.

The vessel was years in the making. Sometimes it takes that kind of effort to make people care. Keep that in mind when you’re fighting the good fight for clean technology.

Sadly, bad news can be easier to care about. Although the plankton decline isn’t so scary, when Louisiana’s seafood restaurants become pasta joints, that will certainly get people’s attention.

Toyota + Tesla = hope for the electric car

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 15:28:00-0400

Bedfellows don’t get much stranger than Toyota and Tesla, who’ve just partnered to create an all-electric RAV4.

If viable, the machine would help Toyota get over the hump of its gasoline dependence while putting a Tesla power train into vehicles that regular people can own. Tesla is the only automaker in the U.S. that builds and sells highway-capable EVs in meaningful volume, claiming over 1,000 Roadsters driving emissions-free in more than 25 countries.

You already know about Toyota’s prim gas/electric hybrid.

Tesla’s racy Roadster, with an MSRP of $109,000, is an all-electric sports car that can go 0 to 60 mph in 3.7 seconds and travel 244 miles on a single charge of its lithium-ion battery pack.

Tesla plans to produce and deliver a fleet of all-electric RAV4 prototypes to Toyota for evaluation within the year.

Can the new RAV4 make people forget the runaway death Prius? Can it teach Toyota about harnessing reliable power from laptop batteries? Can it bring the electric car concept (and price) down to earth?

Let’s hope.

This has been done before, sort of. Toyota made 1,500 electric RAV4s between 1997 and 2003. Actor Ed Begley Jr. still has one:

It's official: Climategate undermined trust in scientists

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 15:41:00-0400

If you can’t trust scientists about climate change, who can you trust?

Americans lost faith in scientists and grew more skeptical about the reality of global warming following Climategate, according to a compelling new report, “Climategate, Public Opinion and the Loss of Trust,” by the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.

Climategate refers to the e-mail leak heard around the world in November 2009. Skeptics claimed it as smoking-gun evidence that climate scientists are exaggerating global warming, suppressing research they don’t like, and hiding information from the public.

The report, released on Monday, shows that Americans surveyed just after Climategate broke were significantly:

More doubtful that global warming is really happening,
Less likely to blame humans (as opposed to natural causes) for global warming, and
Less trusting of scientists. (Scientists, however, remained much more trusted than weather reporters, President Obama, Al Gore, religious leaders or the mainstream media.)

An individualistic world view and a conservative ideology were the best predictors of a survey respondent’s loss of trust in climate scientists, the report said.

Other factors that may have contributed to the decline in belief, trust and worry around global warming include the moribund economy, the new administration and Congress, media coverage and abnormally cool weather.

Whatever your belief, the safe bet is planning for the worst and hoping for the best.

Next BP victim: 'brand journalism'

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 15:30:00-0400

The brand journalist is the one of the most compelling marketing concepts I’ve encountered in a while.

A brand journalist is an in-house newshound, preferably with professional reporting experience, who works for your company instead of an independent news organization. You unleash him or her to mine stories – from the inside – that make good corporate blog posts, video, photos, charts, e-books, white papers and the like. The theory is that the content, conceived and produced by a real enough journalist, will be compelling, polished, believable, persuasive and maybe even authentic.

“Brand Journalism is not a product pitch,” says marketing strategist David Meerman Scott. “It is not an advertorial. It is not an egotistical spewing of gobbledygook-laden corporate drivel. Brand Journalism is the creation of Web content … that delivers value to your marketplace and serves to position your organization as one worthy of doing business with.”

When I first learned of the practice, it was a eureka moment. Media consumers are starving for authenticity, and the business world is generally failing to deliver it. Brand journalism! This was the answer.

So leave it to BP to spoil a good thing.

The company has contaminated the Gulf with “BP reporters” writing eerily feel-good posts and coaxing positive comments from locals. Comments like “there is no reason to hate BP” and “the oil spill was an accident.” One ‘BP reporter’ actually characterized cleanup work as a “ballet at sea as mesmerising as any performance in a concert hall, and worthy of an audience in its own right.” Gag me.

As if BP weren’t already leaking credibility by the barrel, CNN last night tore them a new one for posts like these.

Said media watcher Howard Kurtz, “There isn’t one person in America who is going to be fooled by this propaganda campaign. The reporting has been so positive you’d think they were on BP’s payroll. Oh, that’s right, they are on BP’s payroll. Maybe that explains it.”

Want authenticity? You’ve got it in Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish, La., and force of nature. “You know, instead of hiring PR people to talk about ballets on the water, if we just do the right thing, sit down and deploy every piece of equipment, there's something [for BP] to hang your hat on,” he said. “Look in the camera and say, ‘We're doing everything feasibly possible to save coastal Louisiana, to contain this oil, to pick it up, to make this wrong right. There's your PR. But don't just say it. Go out there and do it, and the PR will take care of itself.’”

Pretty good counsel.

I still like the idea of brand journalism, but an unprecedented environmental disaster has somehow yielded an unprecedented PR disaster. So maybe BP should just give it a rest.

BP's transparency -- as clear as mud

Wed, 26 May 2010 14:21:00-0400

If BP gets anything, they finally seem to get the need for transparency in a crisis, at least to the degree that they have begun streaming live video from the gusher that has spewed millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. In this case, transparency is not pretty.

BP leaking credibility by the barrel

Fri, 14 May 2010 13:20:00-0400

Are you as big a fool as I am? I’ve been giving BP the benefit of the doubt on the gulf oil disaster – until this morning, when I learned that the gusher could be spewing 11 to 16 times as much as BP has been saying. That's equivalent to a new Valdez spill every four or five days. The bigger estimate is from of a Purdue University fluids expert without an apparent dog in this fight.

Either volume is a lot for the ecosystem to choke down. But if BP’s 5,000-barrels-a-day estimate is spin (and as of this morning on CNN, BP was sticking to that estimate), it has colossally backfired. In addition to the permanent damage to the company brand, the number has real implications for how you clean the mess up.

“I am concerned that an underestimation of the oil spill’s flow may be impeding the ability to solve the leak and handle the management of the disaster,” said U.S. Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass. “If you don’t understand the scope of the problem, the capacity to find the answer is severely compromised.”

Until this morning, I’ve viewed the tragedy less as a product of BP’s greed than the inevitable consequence of our oil addiction. To the extent we drive more miles than we need to in autos bigger than we require, I reasoned, we all share blame for this. Now, I just wonder what else BP is hiding.

So, apparently, does the Today show’s Ann Curry, who grilled (video) BP’s COO this morning, putting the company’s sinking credibility on excruciating display. Spoiler alert: If you expected an apology, you’ll be disappointed.

At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, in a crisis, come clean. Early on. It’s how you start making the best of a bad situation -- or in this case, a situation going from bad to worse.

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Posts from our sister blog on crisis communications:

Are we there yet? Time for energy efficiency to get its sexy on

Tue, 04 May 2010 13:41:00-0400

Today’s blog is posted by guest blogger, Ed Marshall, a Senior Account Manager at Beaupre.

How soon before we hit peak oil production? According to the U.S. military, it might be two years from now, or even less. If true, we’re well on our way to the real Energy Crisis. And the key to riding it out just might be efficiency technologies like that itchy pink insulation in your attic.

Peak oil is the point when the world’s oil production reaches its highest rate and begins its inevitable decline, creating an oil deficit relative to demand.

That will happen globally in 2012 with “severe” shortfalls on world markets by 2015, according to a report issued by the United States Joint Forces Command. The UK’s Guardian newspaper covered it. Peak oil in the U.S. has already passed. It was 1970 for the lower 48 states.

So we just fill the gap with all kinds of renewable energy projects, right? Wrong.

It will take decades to spool up replacement technologies and attendant infrastructure. See, oil is a very energy dense and convenient source of power. Battery technology is a long way from matching oil’s energy density, and it has its own “peak” problems (lithium doesn’t exactly grown on trees). It will also need a materials-intensive charging infrastructure program to even begin propelling the millions of passenger cars currently on the road. Bio-fuels? Also not as energy-dense as petroleum, meaning you’d have to produce a hell of a lot more of it to replace a lesser volume of petroleum. Also, bio-fuels have a raft of production scaling issues that are, again, many years away from being addressed (let’s talk dry materials storage and handling!). Oh, and ethanol tends to pick up water easily and is fairly corrosive, so the existing gasoline pipeline transportation infrastructure isn’t well-suited to handling it.

Without a couple decades to work through these problems, we’d be better off focusing not on producing replacement fuels, but increasing efficiency – making the most of what’s at hand.

For instance, let’s tighten up our buildings. Buildings account for almost 50 percent of energy consumption in the U.S. (and a proportionate share of carbon emissions), according to the EIA. As we gin up those turbines, let’s be retrofitting the building sector – utilizing everything from smart glass like SAGE to advanced insulation materials and onsite combined heat units. And build this stuff into new construction.

Dare I suggest telecommuting? We’ve spent decades building a robust, intercontinental Internet. Surely it can handle remote workers, ecommerce and funny cat clips on YouTube.

Efficiency measures like these are in our collective DNA. A market-based economy is supposed to excel at efficiency and we’re generally good at it when we make the effort. Unfortunately, the easy availability of cheap energy has limited its appeal to date. Why insulate if heating oil is cheaper than Pepsi?

Back in December of 2009, President Obama unveiled a program of incentives to drive efficiency behaviors – and jobs – which subsequently became known as “cash for caulkers.” This passage from the linked article is telling:

"I know the idea may not be very glamorous, although I get really excited about it," Obama chuckled as he described the discussion at a roundtable on job creation he took part in just before his remarks. "Insulation is sexy stuff."

I agree, but for most folks, we’ll need to sex it up a bit, as the Brits say. There’s an image problem with energy efficiency. Ever since President Carter put on a sweater and went on national television in February of 1977 to say that we’d have to turn down the thermostat to build a better future, the concept of efficiency has been firmly wedded to that of sacrifice, rather than something sexier, like, say progress. Efficiency is a topic ripe for an extreme makeover.

So how, exactly, do we make energy efficiency sexy? More about that in my next post.

Posted by: Ed Marshall

10 Earth Day links to help your planet

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 15:19:00-0400

Today we are pleased to have guest blogger, Michelle Dillon, an Account Manager at Beaupre, with some Earth Day tips.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. This is the message Jack Johnson is sending to children (and anyone else listening) in his song “The 3 R’s” found on the Curious George Soundtrack "Sing-A-Longs and Lullabies.” It’s one of my son’s favorite songs to sing along to – well for an 18 month old, it’s more like a hum. Today while singing, I turned to him and said, “This is a great song for Earth Day.” He nodded!

This is what Earth Day is partly about … educating young and old alike on taking care of our planet for a better future. This shouldn’t just be one day of caring and giving back to the Earth; it should be something we strive to recognize in every action we take.

Where to begin though? It can be something simple. My pledge is to purchase a countertop composter and start composting my family’s food waste.

Looking for ideas to help the Earth every day? Here are 10 sites containing tips, articles and resources to get you or your company started:

ABC News: http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=7395740

Clean Techies: http://bit.ly/djWave

Climate Counts: http://www.climatecounts.org/

Earth911: http://earth911.com/earthday/

EPA: http://www.epa.gov/earthday/tips.htm

Inc: http://www.inc.com/guides/2010/04/earth-day-initiatives.html

Jetson Green: http://bit.ly/aouQrN

Preserve: http://www.preserveproducts.com/recycling/index.html

Whole Foods Market: http://bit.ly/asQi7G

Yo Baby: http://bit.ly/9beYFO

SAGE's re-imagining of windows will help save $300 billion in energy

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:35:00-0400

This morning Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Steven Chu – joined by Senators Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar – announced $100+ million in DOE funding and IRS green manufacturing tax credits for our client SAGE Electrochromics.

These funds will help SAGE establish a new 250,000 sq. ft. facility in Faribault, Minnesota used to manufacture energy-saving, electronically tintable dynamic glass that makes buildings more energy efficient and creates hundreds of new, skilled, green manufacturing jobs.

While hundreds of buildings have already installed SageGlass windows, this new government funding will enable the company to mass produce its glass and bring this energy saving technology to the world.

Secretary Chu has repeatedly said the biggest gains in decreasing this country’s energy bill, the amount of carbon dioxide and our dependency on foreign oil will come from energy efficiency and conservation in

SAGE Electrochromics' SageGlass
Courtesy photo

the next 20 years. SageGlass is a leading example of an energy efficiency technology.

SageGlass products transform windows from an energy liability to an energy source. The potential for energy savings is significant because energy loss through windows accounts for about 30% of heating and cooling energy. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), electrochromic windows like those produced by SAGE can save one-eighth of all the energy used by U.S. buildings each year. This is equivalent to about 5% of the nation’s energy budget. This translates into savings of approximately $300 billion over the next 20 years.

That’s not chump change.

SAGE focused on something each of us experiences every day – glass – and re-imagined it, transforming glass into something innovative that helps make the world a better place and America more competitive.

This is a great example of how something seemingly mundane like a window can become highly transformational.

Hummer: a beast of a brand

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 13:16:00-0400

Branding is tricky business.

It’s not enough to crisply differentiate a product, provide stellar service and reinforce your customers’ delusions of grandeur. The whims of the market might still bring you down.

That’s what’s happened with the Hummer. Say what you want about the make, now being euthanized by GM, but you can’t deny the brand's potency. Huge. Tough. Dangerous. Cavalier. I am a force. Reckon with my a**.

The problem was, the brand couldn't contain its own machismo. Like a downhill ski racer hurtling off the course, the machine’s daring was its downfall. Utterly and unapologetically ginormous, it came to stand for everything that’s wrong with our auto-addicted, fossil-fueling, high-beaming selves. As we used to chant on the playground, Hey! Hey! Get outta my way! I just got back from the USA!

Which reminds me, a buddy of mine rolled up on a sexy new BMC racing bicycle the other day. Beefy, squared-off tubes. Not to be messed with.

“Dude,” I said, “that baby is the Hummer of bikes.”

Like a good liberal, he blanched.

Oops, sorry, meant that as a compliment. He likes the bike because it’s Swiss.

Anyway, a pending deal to sell Hummer to a Chinese concern fell through this week, prompting GM to say it will begin the “orderly wind-down of the Hummer operations.” As with the other brand GM recently tried to retire, Saab, there’s a glimmer of hope. That would be of interest to the 3,000 people who make and sell Hummers in the US, including 950 who work at an already shrinking GM plant in Shreveport, La.

If the brand does collapse, you can’t blame it on the brand per se. Gas prices, recessionary times, heightened eco-consciousness and a more touchy-feely zeitgeist also played roles. But wait, that’s getting back to the brand, isn’t it?

After all, the Hummer isn’t the only vehicle that gets paltry mileage. In fact, the Hummer H3T at 16 mpg was green enough to get on the cash-for-clunkers trade-up list – not as a clunker but as an approved replacement. There’s a fair number of Audis and Beemers in that mileage range, and no one's callilng for their demise.

So maybe the Hummer got a bad rap. Or maybe it didn’t. Either way, the Hummer is gone (nearly). In the elegiac words of the Bard of Big, Hummerpedia.org:

This is the end, my only Hummer friend, the end. Bad news for those who love the H make.

<sniff!> Gone, perhaps, but not forgotten. It was a beast of a brand.

Smart grid marketers rejoice

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 21:04:00-0400

Marketers for smart grid products have had it rough because it's like trying to sell a movie without a story line. Few people outside the energy industry have a clue as to how the smart grid will work. Unresolved standards keep us from knowing what it will be made out of. And the smart grid's promise of energy efficiency and cleaner air have been unsubstantiated guesses at best.

But on this last point, smart grid marketers now have a reason to smile. The U.S. Department of Energy has done the math and has finally wrapped some great numbers around smart grid efficiencies, providing much-needed fuel for the marketing machine.

According to a new DOE report, the smart grid will enable us to cut energy consumption by 12% by 2030, and cut carbon emissions from power plants by the same amount.

Smart grid marketers can now crisply message around how they're going to reduce your electric bill while also greening the planet.

But for the message to stick, they also have to tackle the other fore mentioned obstacles by scrubbing the unnecessary technobabble from smart grid conversations. Today, smart grid marketers trumpet things like Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), peak-load demand response and home area networks (HANs). These terms are fine for B2B sales and marketing within the energy industry. But to create the consumer pull-demand that could accelerate smart grid deployments, marketers will need to create a new consumer-friendly lexicon.

Toyota's reputational challenges: a job for George Mitchell or Madeleine Albright?

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:04:00-0400

Of the latest developments in the Toyota saga, the most potentially harmful to the company’s brand equity lacks the flash of its brethren, but packs a stronger long-term wallop. The most interesting new development in Toyota’s woes is the growing chorus of mumbles about the Prius, the world’s marquee hybrid vehicle and an icon in the green community.

Powering that story line is Steve Wozniak’s speculation that a software-related problem made his Prius accelerate on its own, and growing concerns that the Prius’ brakes are as problematic as the accelerators in its other models. Coming in a close second to the Prius is Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s offhand statement (since retracted) advising owners not to drive their recalled vehicles until a new safety device is installed. Although LaHood said he misspoke, the damage was already done.

However, the most worrisome news for Toyota is the DOT’s apparent willingness to fine the company for failing to respond quickly enough to reports that its gas pedals were sticking. That cuts right to the heart of Toyota’s competence and regard for consumers. If the feds fine the company, it will legitimize accusations that the company didn’t move quickly enough to correct a potentially dangerous problem. Again, it gets back to consumers willing to forgive mistakes, but not inattention. It will be interesting to see whether Toyota greets the growing chorus of criticisms with the transparency we advocated in our last blog.

One PR case study after the next has shown that as bad as things can get because of the facts, evasiveness makes it worse. Maybe the best thing the company could do is hire an outside investigator with sterling credentials to trace the problems from beginning to end, and cop out to whatever he/she dishes out. Sounds like a job for Madeleine Albright, George Mitchell or Sandra Day O’Connor.

How GM can get its groove back

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:05:00-0400

In an interview this week with NPR at the 2010 Detroit Auto Show, GM Vice-Chairman Bob Lutz was bemoaning how the company lost its way from the days when GM made its greatest cars in 50s and 60s.

Later that day, my iPod Shuffle dished up Neil Young's "Johnny Magic," whose video takes place inside Young's electrified '59 Lincoln, the LincVolt. And that's when it struck me ... with so much of GM's future riding on plug-in hybrids, why not be like Neil?

UPDATE: Yes, I realize that Ford built the Lincoln, not GM. I'm just saying...

Urban farming sows seeds of hope in Detroit

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 09:26:00-0400

What comes to mind when you think of Motor City? America’s proudest industry crushed? Twenty-seven percent unemployment? An exodus of more than half the populace?

How about a wasteland where you can buy a house for $15,000, if you dare live in it?

John Hantz sees all that but also envisions Detroit as the nation’s first urban farm. Acre after acre of sustainable agriculture could create jobs, attract tourists, yield the local produce consumers crave, and create scarcity of real estate to revive a moribund market.

“We need scarcity,” the wealthy stockbroker tells Fortune. “We can’t create opportunities, but we can create scarcity.”

An estimated 40 square miles of land lies abandoned in the 138-square-mile metropolis. The concept of farming it is drawing positive if cautious responses from various quarters. Says the American Institute of Architects, “Detroit is particularly well-suited to become a pioneer in urban agriculture at a commercial scale.” Fortune includes favorable quotes from a Harvard urban planning professor and a former HUD official as well.

Hantz Farms envisions tomatoes and greens germinating in the spring and shoppers harvesting ripe produce for the table in the summer and fall. The investor is offering $30 million for a pilot and is asking for free tax-delinquent land and zoning changes that would lower taxes.

Hantz has his critics and skeletons, but the idea is wildly fresh. And given the city’s legacy – creating an industry that helps warm the planet then protecting that industry at all costs – what could be more carbon negative?

2009: Looking back at the year in environmental issues

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 15:59:00-0400

The scribes at here at CleanSpeak central have written about everything from wind, to solar, to endangered natural landscapes, to endangered McMansions, to Christmas trees, to hybrid vehicles this year. We decided to take a look back and nominate our own slate of candidates for the Top 5 Environmental Stories of 2009.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. It included $80 billion for green/sustainable initiatives like a smart power grid, renewable energy technology, home heating efficiency and green job training programs. If the American economy is going to be more sustainable, it’s going to take this kind of government leadership.
The Copenhagen Climate Conference. It didn’t accomplish much of substance, but all of the major players were in one place duking it out, which at least elevates the issue of climate change to a more prominent place in the public eye.
Boeing gets the 787 jet liner off the ground. The 787 Dreamliner, with a composite rather than aluminum skin, represents a future of more environmentally friendly air travel. With its more efficient engines and lightweight construction, the Dreamliner can make long hauls on less fuel than any of its forerunners or its ostensible competitor, the oversized Airbus A380.
More polar bears are going hungry. Polar bears might be to this generation what the canary in the coal mine was the previous generations. Scientists in 2009 announced that the number of under-nourished bears has tripled in the last 20 years. The culprit is warmer global temperatures that are shrinking the ice masses where the world’s largest land predator hunts for seals.
Chevrolet officially unveils the Volt. General Motors is staking a lot of its future on the plug-in hybrid, which is its long-delayed answer to hybrids from Toyota, Honda, Ford, and now Mercedes. That’s quite a turnaround for the company known for environmental nightmares like the Humvee, which gets about nine yards per gallon if it has a good tail wind.

There were, of course, innumerable other environmentally tinged stories this year. Any thoughts on what should have made the list? Let us know!

Cuttyhunk says 'YIMBY' to wind power

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 14:57:00-0400

Unlike the new NIMBYs, selectmen in the town encompassing Massachusetts’ Cuttyhunk Island say they will support a wind farm off their shores, a position directly at odds with many of their neighbors to the immediate east on Martha’s Vineyard.

Residents seem to back the decision:

“I don’t think you can just say, ‘Not in my backyard,’ and expect that will be OK,’’ said resident Nina Brodeur. “If I had my preference, I’d choose not to see them. But I understand the needs of the state, and if it’s not in my backyard, it would have to be in somebody else’s. We can’t close our eyes and think we’re more special than anyone else.’’

At issue is Cape Wind, the embattled wind farm proposed for Nantucket Sound. Opponents say the landmark project will be a blight on the horizon and ruin a historic Native American site. The project also help Cuttyhunk residents, as part of Massachusetts’ poorest community, pay their utilities:

“I think the wind farm is a great idea,’’ said George Isabel, 59, who has lived on Cuttyhunk since 1968 and serves as police chief and harbor master. “People here can’t afford to turn on their air conditioners or electric heat. Something has to give, because it’s hard to survive. There could be big benefits for us.’’ (Source: Boston Globe)

Maine may be next for offshore wind. The state just announced three offshore wind test sites.

A couple other developments in the wind arena:

Endangered bat concerns stall another wind farm

A West Virginia judge just halted progress of an Appalachian ridgeline wind farm because the developer failed to account for endangered Indiana bats on the property. Developers don’t have to prove that nobats will die in the project, just that the damage – presumably from construction, displacement and/or turbine blades – is minimized. That means potentially years of surveying, planning and permits. Plaintiffs in the case said the project would kill 6,746 bats of all kinds annually. Source: New York Times.

Report: Turbines are annoying, perhaps, but not sickening

An expert panel issued a report this month questioning the validity of wind-turbine syndrome, the constellation of symptoms – including sleep problems, headaches, dizziness, anxiety, ringing in the ears – sometimes associated with turbine noise.

“There is no evidence that the audible or sub-audible sounds emitted by wind turbines

have any direct adverse physiological effects,” says the report, prepared by a multidisciplinary panel of medical doctors, audiologists, and acoustical professionals for the American and Canadian wind energy industry associations. The 85-page document does admit that turbine noise can be annoying.

“An annoyance factor to wind turbine sounds undoubtedly exists, to which there is a great deal of individual variability. Stress has multiple causes and is additive. Associated stress from annoyance, exacerbated by the rhetoric, fears, and negative publicity generated by the wind turbine controversy, may contribute to the reported symptoms described by some people living near rural wind turbines.”

Source: Wind Energy

Government aims to crowdsource cleantech innovation

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 09:19:00-0400

With solar, wind, PHEVs, geothermal, biofuels and most other green technologies still out of reach for most people, the U.S. Department of Energy wants to try crowdsourcing our way to affordable clean energy.

The DOE recently launched an open-source wiki called Open Energy Information (OpenIE.org) as a community platform for collectively solving our energy challenges. What Wikipedia did for socializing world knowledge, OpenIE.org can do for clean technology innovation, the thinking goes.

“The true potential of this tool will grow with the public’s participation — as they add new data and share their expertise — to ensure that all communities have access to the information they need to broadly deploy the clean energy resources of the future,” said Secretary of Energy Steven Chu in the Agency’s press release.

OpenIE.org bills itself as a linked open data platform, trying to create synapses between all the world’s energy information “to provide improved analyses, unique visualizations, and real-time access to data.” Anyone can post and edit information, upload additional data to the site and download information in easy-to-use formats.

The site currently houses more than 60 clean energy resources and data sets, including maps of worldwide solar and wind potential, information on climate zones, and best practices. To give it even more social cred, OpenIE.org links to the DOE’s Virtual Information Bridge to Energy (VIBE), a browseable collection of widgets that provide up-to-date industry information and unique visualizations of clean energy data.

It’s a compelling idea. Most cleantech science is forged within silos, isolated in commercial and academic research labs. A global hive mind of expertise could bring a Red Bull jolt of collective creativity to unstick long-stuck science problems.

But will the labs be willing to play ball on an open source field if meant opening up their IP to competitors?

Meet the new NIMBYs

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 09:27:00-0400

All good people support renewable energy, right?

It depends.

As the country gets serious about solar, wind and other renewables, and the government steps in with subsidies, parties that traditionally fell in line on eco issues are increasingly squaring off.

Cape Cod's oldest windmill dates from the 1600s and is located in West Yarmouth

The Nature Conservancy, for example, describes how a 7,900-acre wind farm in Kansas brought in 20 miles of roads, 100 towers, transmission lines and a substation, threatening habitats for endangered birds and devouring a big chunk of the country’s disappearing prairie. The organization warns that new energy development will occupy nearly 80,000 square miles of land by 2030 – larger than Minnesota. One state director’s job is seen as mostly “reforming wind power.”

Rural Nevada got a shocker when it learned that two large solar farms, in addition to creating hundreds of jobs, would need 1.3 billion gallons of water per year, or about 20 percent of the desert valley’s supply (via New York Times).

Water plays a huge, underpublicized role in solar and many other forms of energy production, prompting one analyst to introduce an ominous new eco buzzword: “water footprint.”

Water plays a different role in Cape Wind off Massachusetts, potentially the country’s first offshore wind farm, which last week was threatened by a move to place Nantucket Sound on the National Register of Historic Places. “The identity and culture of the indigenous Wampanoag (Native Americans) are inextricably linked to Nantucket Sound,” according to a Massachusetts Historical Commission opinion.

CNET sums it all up perfectly, saying, a “new breed of NIMBY (not in my backyard) is emerging: opponents of wind or solar installations who generally support renewable energy, just as long as they are built somewhere else.”

Cash for Clunkers or 'Pimp My Pickup'?

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:20:00-0400

The most common trade under the $3 billion Cash for Clunkers program involved Ford F150 pickup truck owners trading for, well, new Ford F150s, netting an improvement of just 1 to 3 mpg, the Associated Press is reporting. That trade happened 8,200 times. Thousands of other pickup owners used ~~our tax dollars~~ their clunker cash on new Chevy Silverados and Dodge Rams.

Worse, more than half a million dollars in rebates somehow went for autos that got equal or lesser mileage. The government is investigating.

The federal program was billed from the start as good news for our economy, the environment and consumers’ pocketbooks. Overall, it netted a 60 percent improvement in fuel economy between the trade-in and new cars purchased, according to the Transportation Department, which called the program “enormously successful.”

If you got $3,500 to $4,500 for your new rig, you probably don’t disagree.

Don't do cash for clunkers

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 12:07:00-0400

I’m keeping my clunker. And you should, too.

Mine’s a Honda Accord, so it doesn’t actually qualify as a clunker despite its 150,000 loyal miles, but on principle I would not do “cash for clunkers.” Let me tell you why.

Long before the word warming was ever married to global, we understood we were filling landfills too quickly. The concept of recycling emerged, and attentive citizens learned the mantra reduce, reuse and recycle. In that order.

Thus my first beef with cash for clunkers: It puts the recycle cart before the reduce and reuse horses, and in this case recycle is a euphemism. Although cash for clunkers sounds kind of green, it equates to destroy and produce.

You annihilate a working automobile by pouring sodium silicate (liquid glass) into the engine to ensure it never goes another mile, killing 30 percent of its resale value. A recycler removes some parts for resale, drains the haz-waste fluids, mashes it into a steel pancake, puts them on a barge to who knows where, or chops them into bits, producing carbon at every step.

Meanwhile, you produce a new car from materials mined from the good green earth, processed in a steel plant, shipped to an auto plant, manufactured with carbon-generating energy, shipped to dealerships and driven home by someone who just threw away the car that got him to the showroom. It takes somewhere between 3 and 12 tons of carbon dioxide to make a new car.

(Since this is a clean tech blog, I won’t go off on the confiscatory aspect of this – why should you as a taxpayer pay for my new car? And if that’s what it takes to stimulate the economy, maybe we should just ride out the recession. I won’t harp on the fact that this is ultimately another staggering gift from your grandkids to the auto industry. Or that it feeds into our worst consumerist compulsions. Or worse, how four of the top five new car models that clunkheads are buying are made by foreign automakers.)

I’ll stick to our focus and observe that cash for clunkers is about as green as bottled water. The policy goes out of its way to stimulate the unnecessary manufacture, distribution and consumption of objects that are ultimately superfluous. In the best case, you’re taking a pig off the road and replacing it with a hybrid, the net gas-mileage/pollution benefit offset by the impacts of manufacturing the hybrid and destroying the clunker. Oh, and not every beneficiary of the program is buying a Prius. Did you know that a new car that gets 22 mpg qualifies for a cash for clunkers subsidy? That’s a pretty low bar.

The crime in all this is that what Washington and we in the middle class call a clunker is quite often a perfectly serviceable means for a lower-income or unemployed person to get to work, see the doctor or take in a ballgame. A clunker can carry meals to seniors or homeless people to shelters. It can give the kids at the tech school some fodder for learning a valuable trade while transforming a clunker into a cream puff.

Cash for clunkers: It’s your cash. Clunkerhood is in the eye of the beholder. It’s not making us green, and it’s putting us in the red. Don’t do it.

- - -

Got an opinion? Tell us what you think.

A wisp of hope for American renewable energy wafts in on the climate & energy bill as China emerges

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 14:05:00-0400

Cap-and-trade, clean energy standards, cash for clunkers and smart grids are the headline grabbers and fight-starters in the climate and energy bill. These stars of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 aren’t, however, going to save the U.S. from also-ran status in the renewable energy economy. Nothing in those provisions – or at least nothing obvious – confronts the very real possibility of China emerging as the superpower of renewable energy in the short term. Out of the limelight, in the bill’s back roads and side streets, lie the gems of hope for America’s future as a player in renewable energy, providing the U.S. can weather the Chinese onslaught. And it’s going to be a hummer of an onslaught.

The Chinese government is going after the top spot in renewable energy with a vengeance, and by employing their unique brew of free market talk and authoritarian action, they’re probably going to get it. If that makes you queasy, it should. The U.S., already a secondary player in renewable energy behind China and the European Union, is staring at yet another possibility of its energy future being tied to a foreign nation. Specifically, a foreign nation that’s also holding much of America’s debt.

There’s plenty afoot to bear out that pessimistic view. China has targeted wind and solar, the two most promising renewable technologies of the moment. The Chinese government has already created the world’s largest domestic wind power market, and they’re using it as a base to conquer the international export market for wind turbines. Using its success in textiles, food processing, electronics and consumer goods as a model, China has erected mazes of regulations specifically aimed at screwing foreign companies out of Chinese business. That gives Chinese companies a chance to flourish without competition on their home turf, subsidizing their push into export markets.

Having flashbacks to the Japan Inc. of the 1980s? The gradual demise of GM, Ford and Chrysler at the hands of Toyota and Honda? Well this is worse. Unlike democratic Japan, China doesn’t even pretend to play by free market rules. The New York Times reported last week that companies who built manufacturing plants inside China to satisfy domestic content requirements were aced out of the turbine market when the government outlawed turbines of less than 1,000 KW capacity. With tactics like that, it won’t be long before Chinese companies are the Honda and Toyota of the renewable energy industry. Next step, a wind farm near you. And solar is next on the agenda.

Even if China didn’t have a head start in renewable energy technology production, the U.S. wouldn’t be able to compete in volume manufacturing of renewable energy products any more than it could in apparel or consumer goods. China has a lower cost structure based on indentured servitude wages and light regulatory burdens. The U.S.’s winning game is not volume manufacturing of wind turbines or anything else. It’s innovation.

That brings us back to the climate and energy bill. There is $190 billion in the bill to fund renewable energy research. From the Apollo program to the Internet, the U.S. government has proven itself a great engine of new technology. That is the real secret weapon in the American renewable energy arsenal – a constant stream of new and better ideas.

The U.S. is the Saudi Arabia of innovation. No country has a better record of new technology development than this one. American universities and research institutes still attract the world’s best minds. The bill calls for establishing national centers of excellence in renewable energy technology across the country. Massachusetts took a similar approach in the 1980s under Gov. Michael Dukakis, funding centers of excellence in biotechnology, photovoltaics, nanotechnology and micro processing. Supplementing its disproportionately large share of world-class universities, the centers of excellence helped keep Massachusetts a technology leader. North Carolina had similar success with Research Triangle Park, which isn’t a center of excellence per se, but shows how government can effectively prime the private research pump.

China is gearing up to produce today’s state-of-the-art wind and solar technology. Let them. There is plenty of profit in developing tomorrow’s state of the art. Today’s solar and wind technology, for example, isn’t all that efficient. Most solar cells convert only 30 percent of the light that hits them into electricity. Wind turbines can’t turn light breezes into energy. There are no technologies for large-scale energy storage to even out the production peaks and valleys that make wind and solar unreliable in much of the world. Here’s betting the answers to those conundrums are going to come out of American laboratories.

A post script: Lest there seem to be a smack of jingoism in this post, I’ll say for the record that I’m all for China turning into a renewable energy superpower. The country is industrializing at a breakneck pace, creating a gargantuan demand for energy. Burning coal and oil to satisfy the demands of 1.3 million consumers portends a dismal future for the environment. Every wind turbine in the Gobi Desert or the South China Sea is an investment in a better world for everyone. As an American and a believer in democratic principles, I’d still like to think that we have a better way of developing a renewable energy economy than China. But as a father and potential grandfather, here’s hoping that both countries get there one way or the other.

LEED gets real

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:42:00-0400

The LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standard was a much needed imprimatur for unifying all the players in the green building industry. It has spawned more than 14,000 green building projects worldwide since its unveiling in 2000.

But critics have long argued that the LEED system is broken and doesn’t really live up to its eco-friendly mantle. They cite meager energy saving improvements and an easy-to-game point system that rewards individual features rather than a building’s total sustainability as just a few of its flaws. More significantly, LEED accreditation is awarded based on hypothetical estimates of energy modeling that was done at the design phase rather than the building’s actual energy performance when it’s in use.

Last week, the US Green Building Council (USGBC) took a step toward addressing its critics by injecting performance measurement and accountability into the latest version of the LEED standard. With LEED v3, building owners will have to regularly report on how much energy and water their buildings truly consume as a precondition to ongoing LEED certification. The new requirement aims to close the “performance gap” between imaginary and actual conservation.

The USGBC says the new rules will deliver two key benefits. First, the insight gleaned from the building performance data will help improve future versions of the standard by identifying which LEED specs work and which don’t. Secondly, they theorize that forcing certified building owners to report energy use on an ongoing basis will cause them to knuckle down and reduce the amount they use.

Justin Moresco at GigaOM’s Earth2Tech blog added that the new rule could also boost demand for products from companies that develop energy-related technologies for buildings. And I see great potential for integrating Smart Grid capabilities into the LEED process. That’s because one way to meet the new requirement is to let the USGBC monitor a building’s performance directly using the local utility as its information gateway. Smart meters, sensors and Smart Energy management systems will be essential to making this happen.

While the new rules are a small step towards improving a flawed LEED system, establishing accountability is one of the proven ways to turn around an under-achiever.

UNH sets national precedent with major landfill gas project

Fri, 22 May 2009 09:09:00-0400

Congratulations to our friends and neighbors at the University of New Hampshire for becoming the first university in the nation to use landfill gas as its primary fuel source.

That gas is methane, which is produced naturally as garbage decays at landfills like Turnkey in Rochester, N.H., operated by UNH partner Waste Management Inc. UNH runs a plant at the landfill site to compress and purify methane collected from 300 extraction wells and miles of pipes. After processing, the gas travels through a 12.7-mile pipeline to the campus’s co-generation plant in Durham. Since 2006, the plant has used commercial natural gas to generate electricity and divert “waste heat” from the power generation to warm campus buildings. This week, the university declared the new system complete, meaning it is now turning on the landfill source. Up to 85 percent of the campus’s electricity and heat will come from the purified natural gas, according to the university.

The total cost of the “EcoLine” project is $49 million, including the pipeline and processing plant. The university is going on record predicting a 10-year payback. To finance the project as well as additional sustainability projects, UNH will sell renewable energy certificates (RECs) and excess power.

“This massive project, more than four years in the making, will reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and stabilize our fuel source and costs,” UNH President Mark W. Huddleston said in a news release. “EcoLine showcases UNH’s fiscal and environmental responsibility and secures our leadership position in sustainability.”

With the help of EcoLine and RECs sales, UNH is pledging to cut its greenhouse emissions by 50 percent by 2020 and by 80 percent by 2050 with a carbon neutrality target of 2100.

As national policy makers ponder a nuclear energy renaissance and consumers sustain a heavy demand for petroleum, it’s wonderful to see this glorious pipe dream come true. Thank you, Waste Management, and thank you, UNH.

Baseball, apple pie and sustainability

Fri, 15 May 2009 11:18:00-0400

Today we are pleased to have guest blogger, Carrie O'Neil, a Sr. Account Executive at Beaupre, write about the local sustainability fair.

This past week the Portsmouth community took some giant steps forward in becoming an eco-municipality at the 2nd annual Portsmouth Sustainability Fair.

As the local Little League played games across the street, and farmer’s market around the corner was a hive of activity, the Sustainability Fair was a more contemporary scene. With human-powered vehicles, composting buckets, geothermal systems, solar hot water systems and rainwater collection systems, the Fair was abuzz with inspiring ideas.

Crowds came to the Zero Waste event with their recycled goods for donation and an open mind about what they can do to reduce their impact on the earth. While kids learned about ocean creatures and crafts made from recycled materials, their parents were able to learn about reducing dependence on fossil fuels and synthetic chemicals.

In addition to the big ticket solar panels and geothermal energy systems you might expect to see at a sustainability event, people saw a lot of small measures like composting, locally grown and fair trade food, weatherization, waterless/earth friendly car washing solutions, and natural beauty products. All these measures, spoke to the single most important change we can make to help the environment: consuming less.

Portsmouth has been Beaupre’s home for 26 years, so it was gratifying for us to witness so much interest in environmentally sustainable practices (We were also pleased to help this local cause).

Maybe some day back-yard composters, geothermal pumps and bio fuels will be woven into the fabric of everyday life just as tightly as the Little League.

Cleantech links for 5-6-2009

Wed, 06 May 2009 14:49:00-0400

- Thinking of going solar? First start with an energy self audit. Here's how (Scientific American)

- Ford is spending $550 million to retool one of its plants into a green car factory (CNET Planetary Gear)

- Is the EPA finally standing up to the corn ethanol lobby? The industry is having a conniption over new biofuel emission rules. (Earth2Tech)

- What do think of Volkswagen's new eco-friendly (or not?) print ad? Greenwash Index wants to know.

- The first LEED Platinum, true Zero Net Energy home in Vermont. (Jetson Green)

- We know the clean energy industry is engineering bacteria to produce better biofuels. But bacteria for better solar panels too?

eBay might be kinda sorta green

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 15:15:00-0400

eBay is going public about going green (surprise), announcing a Green Team “committed to doing even more to help the world buy, sell and think green every day.” But will the green tint stick?

Well, they’ve got a huge solar power installation. Their business happens to promote reuse, which is better than recycling. They pay for cradle-to-cradle packaging and carbon credits. And who’s to say their heart isn’t in the right place? But beyond that…?

Well, there are plenty of newly manufactured consumer items for sale on their site. A lot of small parcels zooming all around the world 24 x 7 (some $2,000 in goods per second, in fact) doesn’t do much in the way of reducing fossil fuel consumption. And, as the New York Times points out, the ad campaign will be on virgin paper. Ouch! The article proves yet again that even modest pretensions to green goodness are subject to scrutiny.

Credit eBay for doing some good work. But from a marketing perspective, it’s hard to own the green leadership mantle when, by all appearances, your carbon footprint is about the same as everyone else’s.

A broader PR palette now critical to move clean technology industry forward

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 19:20:00-0400

Clean technology investment was a major platform for Obama during his campaign.

He said, "My energy plan will put $150 billion over 10 years into establishing a green energy sector that will create up to 5 million new jobs over the next two decades."He promised to create a Clean Technologies Venture Capital Fund, hoping to invest $10 billion per year into this fund for five years. Obama also promised to double science and research funding for clean-energy projects, including those making use of biomass, solar and wind resources. This was such an encouraging vision for our industry.

But the encouraging news is that this wasn’t campaign rhetoric.

Yesterday, President Obama boldly acted on fuel efficiency and global warming. He urged passage of the $825 billion economic stimulus package in the House and Senate. Those bills include billions for investment in renewable energy, conservation and an improved electric grid. He said, “No single issue is as fundamental to our future as energy.”

There’s never been a more critical time for authentic, persuasive, pragmatic, inspired communications. But does “traditional PR” play within this unfolding drama? Are messaging, thought leadership and media relations the core PR elements needed to affect the necessary change?

No, certainly not.

The clean technology industry is a complex ecosystem that includes economics, politics and public policy. Clean technology companies must continually balance these considerations. The industry also has a vibrant moral dimension – a making the world a better place element – that adds legitimacy, scope, involvement and urgency.

In this dicey economic time, the clean technology industry needs even greater support from investors, public policy makers and the public itself to blossom. To achieve the progress President Obama envisions, we must think, plan and act holistically from a communications perspective as the clean tech industry develops and markets products and solutions that ultimately enable us to live cleaner, greener, better lives.

Thankfully, public relations now represents a much wider palette. It should – and must - embrace a variety of strategic areas including thought leadership, public advocacy, social media, crisis communications, ethnography, employee communications, corporate social responsibility, multi-cultural relations, healthcare, change management and financial communications.

To name a few.

Depending on the clean tech company, product/service, market segment and challenges faced, many of these communications ingredients must be thoughtfully weighed, integrated and acted upon, often in the same relative timeframe. Again and again and again.

Yes, these are complex, critical, consuming, highly charged challenges for communications professionals.

But what a historic moment to shape a societal/global movement that will continue to grow in urgency as tough times morph … into stable times … and better times.

Clean technology boom: bigger than the Internet? Yes.

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 09:38:00-0400

Journalist Marc Gunther, one of the media's most prominent followers of clean technology trends, lays out the five reasons why he thinks the adoption of clean technology will be a bigger upheaval than even that wrought by the Internet. He predicts that between the size of the industries involved to generational changes that feed the public's appetite for environmentally friendly products, clean technology will touch every thread of our lives. Gunther spoke at the Brodeur-Beaupre Clean Technology Forum at the Harvard Club in Boston in October 2008.

Big green claims invite scrutiny

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 14:23:00-0400

The morning paper provides an object lesson in green PR: be careful what you claim.

The Wall Street Journal deconstructs and essentially debunks Dell’s claim of carbon neutrality, saying Dell failed to include in its carbon footprint things like “the oil used by Dell’s suppliers to make its computer parts, the diesel and jet fuel used to ship those computers around the world, or the coal-fired electricity used to run them.”

In fairness, the carbon footprint is an elusive and arbitrary concept. If I ride my bike to work, I’m saving gas and sparing the atmosphere of exhaust. Then again, my bike parts come all the way from Japan. Then again, an American car has a ton of manufactured parts compared to just 25 pounds of bike. Then again, riding makes me hungry, increasing demand for food that has left a carbon footprint as it’s cultivated, processed, packaged and shipped. Ad infinitum.

The Journal further complicates the carbon neutrality question by delving into Dell’s purchased environmental “credits.” Nonetheless, the paper is even-handed, quoting Bill Burtis, spokesman for Clean Air-Cool Planet, saying Dell is “going farther than most corporations” in trying to minimize its environmental impact. The story does not directly challenge the truth of any specific claim in Dell’s August 2008 press release, of which there are many laudable ones. Still, this was not the story Dell wanted to see.

How green is your Prius?

The Toyota Prius presents another example of a green-positioned product that could be a lot greener. The Journal spotlights a pair of mechanics transforming Toyota Priuses into plug-in electric vehicles, doubling the fuel efficiency of the world’s most popular hybrid. The souped-up (down?) machines still use gasoline, just half as much as the off-the-rack Prius, which gets 50 mpg.

If you prefer biodiesel to electricity, check out this Motor Trend story on a Beverly Hills doctor purportedly using fat from liposuction surgery to power his SUV and his girlfriend’s Lincoln Navigator. This Wired story casts some doubt on the doctor's assertion. Another green claim, albeit a dubious one to begin with, comes under scrutiny and bites the dust.

Greenest of them all

Wired brings all this abstraction and ambiguity down to earth in its list of Top 10 Green-Tech Breakthroughs of 2008. Number one? A humble cement plant. Really. And unlike the other cases, the environmental benefit seems ~~concrete~~ unassailable.

While traditional cement making requires a lot of heat (and thus, fossil fuel), “Calera’s technology, like that of many green chemistry companies, works more like Jell-O setting,” says Wired. “By employing catalysis instead of heat, it reduces the energy cost per ton of cement. And in this process, CO2 is an input, not an output. So, instead of producing a ton of carbon dioxide per ton of cement made — as is the case with old-school Portland cement — half a ton of carbon dioxide can be sequestered.” More here.

Bottom line? To be effective, green claims must be sincere, true, defensible, quantifiable and ready for close examination. Dell, it appears, may have pushed the sincerity envelope by declaring it had achieved carbon neutrality. Although the company is neutral by the marketing department’s yardstick, it’s not by the Journal’s. And who’s yardstick ultimately matters most?

Survey says: cleantech reporters not bullish about U.S. achieving energy independence

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:51:00-0400

Our parent company, Brodeur Partners, announced the results of a new survey with clean energy and environmental reporters regarding their industry outlook and use of social media.

The key takeaways:

Journalists are skeptical about whether the United States can significantly decrease its dependence on fossil fuel.
Academic institutions and government bodies are the most trusted sources of information on cutting-edge clean energy technologies. Over 90% of journalists view these as credible news sources.
Most are influenced by blogs and spend more than an hour each day reading them.

You can read survey results here.

NEWS: Our new clean technology practice launches

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:18:00-0400

Today we launched our new clean technology practice aimed at helping start-ups and established companies gain public support for eco-friendly technologies that will create economic growth, cut energy costs and stave off potential environmental crises.

Here's a link to the news release.