Making a consumer market for zero-emissions miles

Today travelers can rack up frequent flyer miles and trade them in for upgrades, tickets and other amenities. 

How about perks not for zooming across thousands of miles in a fossil-fueled jet, but for zero emission miles? Consumers who collect miles for zero-emissions travel — say, bike riding — could swap them for a cool gadget, like an Apple iPhone, paid for by companies or other individuals who need or want to cut carbon emissions, for example.

That’s an idea from Volvo Group, the global heavy duty transportation company, and its environmental initiative at Commute Greener, which offers an application for consumers, businesses and governments track their carbon footprint and meet goals to cut their emissions.

Volvo’s Magnus Holmqvist said it’s not clear how the market for zero emissions miles for consumers will take shape, but he believes it could help spur people to change their behavior.

SEC wants climate risks disclosed

– Kathy Nieland is U.S. Sustainability and Climate Change leader for global accounting and advisory firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. She also serves on the independent, not-for-profit Carbon Disclosure Project. The views expressed are her own. –

If you think the Securities and Exchange Commission’s new interpretative guidance on disclosing the risks of climate change applies only to big polluters, think again.

The guidance is evidence that the SEC views climate change as among the potential business risks that companies should evaluate and disclose.

Delivering coup-de-grace to cap and trade

John Kemp is a Reuters columnist. The views expressed are his own.

President Barack Obama read the last rites for national cap and trade in 2010 on Feb. 2, while senior Democrats in the House of Representatives prepared to put a stake through its heart to ensure the Environmental Protection Agency does not try to resurrect it unilaterally without congressional approval.

Obama finally bowed to the inevitable and admitted cap and trade might need to be separated from a more popular green jobs bill in the Senate, a shift that would effectively end prospects for cap and trade in 2010.

In a question-and-answer session the president commented: “The only thing I would say about it is this: We may be able to separate these things out. And it’s possible that’s where the Senate ends up.”

Walmart accused of hypocrisy in green initiatives

Just last month, Walmart announced that it would be moving to eliminate non-biodegradable plastic bags from stores across the United States to reduce their collection in landfills. While they’ve demonstrated positive green initiatives, this week there’s been accusations of hypocrisy because they’ve been passing off a harmful, manufactured textile as sustainable.

Environmental advocates had been applauding Walmart for their plastic bag reduction goals and the installation of more energy-efficient systems. For example, coolers that only light up when a shopper’s presence is detected. So this new accusation from the Federal Trade Commission comes at a bad time.

Mount Everest of the seas

David Rockefeller, Jr., a philanthropist, is sponsoring a year-long sailing trip around the Americas looking at environmental impacts on the oceans — from melting ice to fish farms. Here are his thoughts after stepping aboard the voyage for two weeks around Cape Horn.  The views expressed are his own.

For climbers, there is just one Everest.  For sailors, there is just one Cape Horn – the southernmost piece of the American Continents, and often the windiest, most treacherous place in all the oceans.

Eight of us voyagers recently sailed around “the Horn” on a boat called Ocean Watch.  We flew a billowing spinnaker with a graphic of the two American continents and a mainsail sporting our own expedition logo, “Around the Americas, 2009-2010.”  A flock of thirty albatross rode the surprisingly benign ocean swells.  Two breakfasting cruise ships gave scale to the forbidding cliffs.

from The Great Debate UK:

Time to invest in Europe’s bio-clean tech delta

- Luuk van der Wielen is at BE-Basic and Delft University of Technology; Roger Wyse is Managing Director, Burrill & Company, San Francisco. The opinions expressed are their own.-

Today the global megatrends of food security, energy security, global climate change and sustainability command the attention of nations worldwide.  Confronting these challenges will test political systems, drive policy and stress international relations.

To address them successfully, nations and companies are making massive investments in R&D, seeking solutions that will drive global innovation for decades.  The application of modern discoveries in biology and biocleantechnology will be a major enabling force to address these issues.

Indeed, the application of bio-clean technology can potentially mitigate many of Europe’s ecological and economic challenges.  The markets for bio-based (or green) products and technologies made from agricultural waste -- instead of oil -- are currently large and open.

Chinese solar player Yingli looks to score at World Cup

Chinese solar power companies have shone amid the downturn in the solar industry,  converting their low cost advantage into bigger market share and profits.

Now, China’s Yingli Green Energy Holding Co Ltd is making a play to raise its global profile.  It’s taking its solar panels to the world’s biggest sporting event, the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, and has signed up to help sponsor the event.

The news makes Yingli the first renewable energy company to sponsor the World Cup — where the world’s best football (or soccer for U.S. fans) teams compete —  as well as the first Chinese company to seal a global sponsorship deal with FIFA, the world’s governing body for football.

(The Wold Cup this year, coincidentally, is in South Africa, which announced last year government support for solar akin to solar incentives in Germany, the world’s largest market.)

from The Great Debate UK:

Good eco-sense is good business sense too

- Juliet Davenport is founder and CEO of Good Energy, a renewable electricity supplier. She is unique in being the only female founder in the UK of an energy supply business, traditionally a male-dominated sector. The opinions expressed are her own. Reuters will host a "follow-the-sun" live blog on Monday, March 8, 2009, International Women's Day. Please tune in. -

Regardless of their views on climate change and man’s contribution to it, most business leaders agree on one point – as fossil fuels get scarcer and the UK decarbonises our economy, our energy prices will continue to rise.

The UK’s recent cold snap gave us a foretaste of what we could be in for – with some businesses having their gas supplies cut to relieve pressure on pipelines - although it appears that the widely reported claim that the UK had just eight days’ gas supply left was political bluster and scaremongering.

The Department of Business, Energy and Regulatory Reform’s 2008 Energy Markets Outlook projects that the UK could rely on imports for 80 percent of its gas needs by 2020, with huge implications for cost and energy security – and that income pouring out of the country.  And the International Energy Association forecasts serious energy "crunches" occurring within the next 10 years.

New world wines: now from the north

This article by Paul Ames originally appeared in GlobalPost.

The terrace of the elegant 18th-century chateau offers views over the formal French garden and fields filled with neat rows of vines.

This idyllic scene could be reminiscent of Bordeaux or the Cotes du Rhone … were it not for all the snow.

Clean tech nuclear seduces White House

We’re told that President Obama is getting ready to propose a tripling of government loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors to the tune of more than $54 billion.

The move is likely to win over Republicans who want to see nuclear power playing a larger role in a climate bill for the country. Another group of Senators earlier this week said they would support a comprehensive climate bill based on Obama’s State of the Union speech that opened the possibilities of nuclear expansion.

Certainly, the Nuclear Energy Institute would agree the technology is the United States’ largest source of clean-air, carbon-free electricity, producing no greenhouse gases or air pollutants.