Current Savers Blog

Unless you’re in the habit of purchasing bulk orders when you shop online, you can ditch the notion you are helping the environment by skipping a trip to the mall, a recent study has found.

New research by The Institution of Engineering and Technology at Newcastle University in Britain shows online shoppers must order more than 25 items to have any less impact on the environment than traditional shopping due to resources required for shipping and handling.

The study looked at “rebound” effects — or unintended side-effects of policies designed to reduce carbon emissions — of activities that are commonly thought to be green.

Working from home is another commonly mistaken “green” activity, the study said. This practice actually increases home energy use by as much as 30 per cent, and can lead to people moving further from the workplace, stretching urban sprawl and automobile use which increases pollution, the study said.

“Policy makers must do their homework to ensure that rebound effects do not negate the positive benefits of their policy initiatives and simply move carbon emissions from one sector to another,” said Professor Phil Blythe, Chair of the IET Transport Policy Panel and Professor of Intelligent Transport Systems at Newcastle University that produced the report.

While the study focused on transportation issues in the UK, bringing the study to the U.S. could be beneficial for local policy planning, green technology website Green.blorge notes.  ” What works in New York City or Boston won’t work for New Orleans or Jackson, Mississippi,” the website says.

The New York Jets have reached for the brightest star of all – the sun.

On Tuesday, the NFL team announced completion of the largest  solar power system in the National Football League at its headquarters in Florham Park, New Jersey.

The system, made by Yingli Green Energy, is the latest in a series of attempts made by the Chinese solar company to stand out in an increasingly crowded solar space.

Earlier this year, Yingli jostled for space with some of the biggest brands in the world, including McDonald’s, Coca Cola, Budweiser and Emirates during the most anticipated sporting event of the year — the soccer World Cup.

Yingli’s system, powered by over 3000 panels, will reduce emissions by 540 metric tons each year, equal to taking over 100 cars off the road.

For a relatively unknown solar company, these moves should help build a brand name and strike a chord with consumers. And the association with such high-profile sporting events could give solar technology a boost as well.

– Liz Logan is a partner in PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Sustainability and Climate Change practice and leads the company’s efforts as adviser to the Carbon Disclosure Project. Doug Kangos is a PwC partner who focuses on assisting companies respond to demands of greenhouse gas emissions and sustainability reporting. Any views expressed here are their own. –

Carbon reporting by U.S.-based companies today has broad similarities to financial reporting before the enactment of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934. Just as market forces and regulation evolved then, so too now are we seeing a similar trend.

We expect that within this decade, more companies will regard carbon as significant and will develop and implement increasingly sophisticated and accurate programs to track, manage and report emissions data. And to the extent that carbon emissions are monetized through, for example, a cap-and-trade system, they will become subject to conventional accounting and reporting, with their demands for high levels of accuracy, reliability and timeliness.

Reporting demands can come from many sources. Procter & Gamble, for example, recently joined Wal-Mart Stores and others in initiating a sustainability scorecard program for its suppliers. While the substance of these programs varies with the nature of each business, the trend is undeniable and serves as a springboard for other manufacturers and retailers to follow.

Based on these early programs, companies should prepare themselves for more data requests in the near term from major customers.

Investors, in particular, are demanding disclosure of companies’ carbon numbers. Investors want to know that the information can be validated in some manner, whether explicitly by third-party assurance or through disclosure of comparable key performance indicators used by management. When necessary, investors will triangulate all the information they can find so as to feel a level of comfort that the numbers seem reasonable.

Building assurances about these measures is a journey that can take companies several years and can consist of a number of stages and starts with assessment and reflection. Doing so enables an organization to gain valuable knowledge about its challenges and opportunities, which can pay off in efficiencies and increased strategic value.

Greater detail, reliability and sophistication in carbon emissions reporting can foster innovation in emissions reduction at every level within an organization, as well as enable executives to more effectively incorporate climate change risks and opportunities into their strategic planning.

What are the indicators that will mark the advancing maturity in carbon reporting? First, regulatory attention. The increasing recognition of the value of carbon emissions data is resulting (or will eventually result) in some kind of regulation.

A second indicator will involve improved methods for tracking emissions data. Many of today’s programs are in the early stages of development, but we can see steady progress. Companies and their advisers (e.g., accounting firms, environmental consultants) are getting more experienced and savvy about monitoring and assessing carbon emissions in increasingly meaningful and effective ways.

Verification can mean a vastly different thing from one company to another. It may refer to a rigorous and comprehensive examination that is carefully attested to, or it may simply consist of a series of interviews and reviews of high-level analytics.

Further, some service providers adhere to strict accreditation standards—that translate into common practices among their peers—while others are not required to do so, depending on whether the statement is obtained from a consultant, an engineer or a certified accountant. The sophisticated investor will look under the covers of a verification or assurance statement to determine its reliability.

A third indicator won’t come from the companies themselves but from their external stakeholders as they seek greater transparency and make greater use of reported information in their investment decisions. Investors, nongovernmental organizations and regulators will get more of the information they really want from companies: the data that matters most. And with each passing year, they will demand higher levels of specificity and objectivity.

Company data and stakeholder demands will gradually align. The actual form that alignment takes will be dictated by markets and regulators, especially if some form of cap-and-trade legislation becomes law in the United States.

Regardless of the path carbon reporting ultimately takes, there are signals now that help us understand where we are headed. Reliability is possible when strong and vigilant boards recognize the significance of the data to the business and integrate it with their strategies.

They create appropriate controls, processes and systems to monitor and measure the data they need. Once this is in place, third-party assurance can enhance reliability for both management and its stakeholders.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and subsequent oil leak this summer captured urgent intellectual efforts of leading scientists around the world.

Though it was the largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry, it was not the first oil spill nor will it be the last.

To date, scientific studies and published reports on the topic number in the hundreds of thousands. After two months of sorting these reports, Thomson Reuters’ Science Watch is releasing their findings in an extensive Special Topic report with the  most influential research on oil spills, from remediation (including dispersants) to bioindicators.  Citation data from January 2000 to June 2010 was approached from various angles, and trends and anomalies emerge handily.

Science Watch also launched an interactive map that snapshots key research at over 10 global spill sites, including photos. Another section published graphs that detail key findings of scientific reviews.

Longterm effects of BP’s Macondo blowout and spill that sent close to 5 million barrels of crude oil into the Atlantic ocean this summer are yet to be known. Perhaps the hard scientific research of the past can help researchers probe the questions to alleviate any potential damage in the future.

World leaders will hold special talks at the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Wednesday about preserving “biodiversity”. 

That might clear up some misunderstandings — an official involved in negotiating a new U.N. treaty said that some surveys show a worrying number of people reckon it’s a brand of washing powder.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)’s definition runs: “Biological diversity – or biodiversity – is a term we use to describe the variety of life on Earth. It refers to the wide variety of ecosystems and living organisms: animals, plants, their habitats and their genes.”

And it’s being lost at a shocking rate — some U.N. estimates are that three species an hour are going extinct because of loss of habitats to cities, farms and roads to make way for ever more people. Related problems of pollution, climate change and alien species of plants and animals brought in from other parts of the world are also adding to losses. Only about 2 million species have been identified but there could be up to 100 million — by some estimates — from blue whales to amoeba.

As part of a harder-headed way of persuading governments to do more to protect biodiversity, economists are highlighting largely hidden values of nature, such as how forests clean the air or store carbon dioxide, or how coral reefs are nurseries for fish or help cut coastal erosion from storms or tsunamis.

Pavan Sukhdev heads The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity and wants governments to place proper values on the “free” services nature provides. “Just because something is free doesn’t mean it’s worthless,” he says. His team estimates that losses of “natural capital” may be between $2 and $4.5 trillion a year. His project tries to highlight how much it would cost to replace services like insect pollination. Or it shows that the long-term value of a mangrove in Thailand (a source of building wood, fish, coastal protection) is higher than cutting it down and changing it into a shrimp farm.

Negotiators have been working on a draft 20-point plan under the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, meant to be agreed in October at a U.N. meeting in Japan. Among the points in the plan (perhaps to discourage people from trying to put it in their washing machines) is that ”by 2020 at the latest, all people are aware of the values of biodiversity and the steps they can take to conserve and use it sustainably”.

Talks have been sluggish — hours went on deciding whether to use the word “people” in that sentence or alternative phrases using ”everyone”, “everybody”, “humankind” or ”mankind”.

Some want an ambitious overriding mission of “halting biodiversity losses” by 2020 — many others reckon that is out of reach after the world failed even to achieve a goal, set in 2002, of a “significant reduction” in losses by 2010. What’s the best target?

(Pictures: top left – A green grasshopper is seen at the San Francisco University Biodiversity Tiputini Station in Yasuni National Park September 9, 2010. Ecuador is launching a one-of-a-kind initiative to protect a jungle reserve in the park that contains not only a huge variety of plants and animals but 20 percent of the country’s crude oil. REUTERS/Guillermo Granja. Bottom right – A rare albino Southern Right Whale surfaces off southen Argentina, Sept 13, 2010. REUTERS/Maxi Jonas)

Development of shale gas has attracted myriad fans and enemies in recent months: those who cheer a source of natural gas on the home turf of the U.S. and environmentalists who warn the process to release the gas underground risks contaminating drinking water.

This month, Chesapeake Energy, Denbury Resources and Southwest Energy Co. each made headlines for environmental mishaps, and share the top spot in this issue of The Green Gauge, a breakdown of companies that made headlines Sept. 6 to Sept 19 for winning or losing credibility based on environment-related activity.

Selections of companies were made by Christopher Greenwald, director of data content at ASSET4, a Thomson Reuters business that provides investment research on the environmental, social and governance performance of major global corporations. These ratings are not recommendations to buy or sell.

Chesapeake Energy, Denbury Resources, Southwest Energy Co.

In the wake of the Gulf Oil disaster, environmentalists have become increasingly critical of the process of hydraulic fracturing, which involves blasting water, sand and chemicals into shale rock underground in order to retrieve natural gas.  A recent public hearing by the EPA on hydraulic fracturing in Binghamton, New York drew about 200 protesters, and the NGO Riverkeeper published a study in conjunction with the hearings outlining the risks of the technique for water contamination.

Several companies active in hydraulic fracturing for shale gas have faced notable controversies surrounding the impacts of the practice in recent weeks. Chesapeake Energy, a company that hopes to expand its hydraulic fracturing into New York State, was ordered to ensure the safety of its shale wells in Pennsylvania, after the Department of Environmental Protection found methane concentrations in water that could be traced back to several of the company’s sites.

Denbury Resources recently experienced a spill of over 200 barrels of crude oil and 1,500 barrels of hydraulic drilling fluid at a “fracking” shale well in North Dakota.

And Southwest Energy Production was recently sued by 13 families for contamination of the local water supply as a result of its hydraulic fracturing operations in Pennsylvania.

The issue will likely grow increasingly important as shale gas represents a significant source in the projected growth of natural gas production in the Unites States over the next decade.

For a copy of the Riverkeeper report detailing the risks and recent problems associated with hydraulic fracturing click here.

Enbridge, Inc.

While undergoing a congressional inquiry into its oil spill the damaged the Kalamazoo River in Michigan on July 26, Enbridge Inc. faced several additional environmental problems in its pipeline system that have forced additional shut-downs.

On Sept. 9, the company experienced an embarrassing pipeline oil spill of 6,000 gallons of crude oil in the Chicago suburb of Romeoville.  Although Enbridge contained the oil spill, the incident led to a week-long closure of the company’s pipeline outside of Chicago, which carries one third of U.S. crude imports from Canada.

In addition, the company last week temporarily shut a third pipeline in New York after leaks were discovered.   The company’s 6B pipeline system in which the Kalamazoo River spill occurred remains closed almost two months after the Kalamazoo spill due to concerns about its condition and risk to the environment, particularly near the St. Clair River.

Whole Foods Markets

Whole Foods recently introduced a series of sustainable packaging guidelines for all of its 2,100 body care and supplement products.  The new guidelines require suppliers to limit the use of plastic and to switch to post-consumer recycled materials or to materials that are easily recyclable.  The company has given suppliers one year to adopt the new guidelines, and Whole Foods has already committed to switching to all post-consumer recycled content for its store brand body care products by the end of the 2010.

Unilever

Unilever announced it was making a strategic investment in Solazyme, an American biotechnology company that produces renewable oil and bio-products from microalgae.  The investment comes in the wake of increasing pressure on consumer products companies to find sustainable substitutes to palm oil following a scandal surrounding unsustainable palm oil production by Sinar Mas and a campaign by Greenpeace against Nestle concerning the use of palm oil in Kit-Kat candy bars.   Unilever has made a pledge to source all of its palm oil from sustainable sources by 2015, and the company recently announced that it has signed a deal to segregate sustainable palm oil from one of its leaders suppliers, Unimills, as part of this commitment.

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Photo shows A pedestrian walks near a no drilling sign in Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania, September 5, 2010. REUTERS/Tim Shaffer

Germany’s Greens party are already the world’s most successful environmental party – having spent seven years in government of one of the world’s largest economies as junior coalition partners to the centre-left Social Democrats. The Greens wrote Germany’s renewable energy law that helped the country become a major player in wind and solar energy technology between 1998 and 2005 — and the party is chiefly responsible for raising the share of renewable energy to 16 percent of the country’s total electricity consumption.

Although in opposition since 2005, the Greens’ popularity has nevertheless soared to record levels over 20 percent in recent months and the party – which only recently celebrated its 30th anniversary – is doing so well in opinion polls that they could possibly end up heading coalitions in two state elections next year ahead of the SPD in Baden-Wuerttemberg and the city-state of Berlin. 

Pollsters say the Greens are benefitting from an increasing awareness in environmental issues, such as climate change and the public’s opposition to government plans to extend nuclear power in Germany beyond 2021. The Greens are also profiting from voter frustration over broken promises by the ruling parties.

So what’s their secret? Why is the unabashedly pro-environment party so successful in an industrial nation like Germany? We got the chance to chat with the co-chairman of the Greens, Cem Oezdemir, who explained why the Greens are doing so well –but also warned that good opinion polls do not always translate into good election results.

“We’re thrilled about the good run in opinion polls but there’s no danger of us getting arrogant about it like the other parties might,” Greens party co-chairman Cem Oezdemir said in an interview with Reuters at the Greens’ party headquarters in Berlin – under a roof with a photovoltaic system on top. “We’re not going to suddenly start changing our positions according to how the political winds are blowing. We’re sticking to our guns and concentrating on our core issues. We’re not going to squander our political capital and we’re not going to make promises before elections that we forget about after the elections.”

That, in essence, is why the Greens have climbed to around 20 percent in national opinion polls this year from the 10.7 percent they won in the last federal election. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s centre-right coalition has, by contrast, lost credibility and plunged in the polls because many of the pre-election promises the ruling parties made were quickly scuppered after the vote. Pollster and analysts agree the Greens have taken advantage of the weaknesses of the other parties.

The Greens have also been helped by such things as their consistent opposition to a new rail station in the southwestern city of Stuttgart that will cost billions of euros. They are the only party that has argued against the mammoth project from the start and, because most voters in the state are also opposed, have gained from that stance.

As my colleague Dave Graham noted, the Greens are confident they can take control over the state governments in Baden-Wuerttemberg and Berlin next year — a sensational breakthrough for a party that has until now been seen as a small splinter party.

The Greens are also riding high in the polls because they have broken free from their traditional centre-left partners, the SPD, to form a centre-right government in the city-state of Hamburg with Merkel’s Christian Democrats. The so-called “black-green” government in Hamburg with the conservative party (whose party colour is black) has opened the Greens up to new voter groups, analysts say. Oezdemir says they are still the natural allies of the SPD but in a country where no party is strong enough to rule along and allies are needed, the Greens have now opened the door to centre-right alliances. They are also in a three-way coalition in Saarland with the CDU and liberal Free Democrats, a “black-yellow-green” government.

“It shows that we’re not slaves to any one party,” Oezdemir said when asked if he thought the CDU-Greens alliance in the port city had helped the Greens attract conservative voters. “We’re not the SPD-Greens. We’re the Greens. And that means we want to bring as much green content into a government as possible. That works for the most part more easily with the SPD because we have quite a bit in common. But when the math for a SPD-Greens government doesn’t add up or when the content doesn’t mesh, we’re open to other coalitions. We’re not an attachment of the SPD.”

Zoom! Pan! Swish!  Take a look at a new movie of walruses crowding an Alaska beach — as you’ve never seen them before! Shot from 4,000 feet up in the air, the vast herd of walruses looks like a pile of brown gravel from a distance. (A far different view than the extreme close-up in the still photo at left, which was taken at a zoo in Belarus.)

As the camera in Alaska zooms in, you can see there are thousands of walruses scrambling ashore as the ice floes they normally use as hunting platforms melt away. The video was shot this month at Point Lay, Alaska, and distributed this week by the U.S. Geological Survey. It’s impossible to say how many are on this beach in this movie, but an Arctic scientist at World Wildlife Fund estimates between 10,000 and 20,000 of the tusked marine mammals have hauled themselves onto land in Alaska this year as summer Arctic sea ice shrank to its third-smallest recorded size.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Stringer Vladimir Nikolsky (Zoo employee plays with a walrus during celebrations marking the zoo’s 23th birthday in Minsk, Belarus, August 11, 2007)

Video credit: U.S. Geological Survey

The fact that comedian Jay Leno has a serious collection of cars in his 17,000 square-foot-garage in southern California may not surprise fans, but his soft spot for electric and hybrid vehicles most likely will turn a few heads.

In this exclusive interview with GigaOM’s Green Overdrive crew, the host of “The Tonight Show” opens the door to his solar-powered home for dozens and dozens of cars for an animated tour of his collection, including three cherished vintage electric models from the 1900s.

A thaw of ice in the mountains of Norway is helping Lars Piloe and his team of archaeologists uncover a 1,500-year-old trove of equipment used by ancestors of the Vikings to hunt reindeer.

Their work as “ice patch archaeologists” points to one of a few positive side-effects of man-made climate change, widely blamed for shrinking glaciers worldwide.

On other missions to dwindling ice fields they have found arrows, even some with feathers attached. And another expert found a 3,400-year-old leather shoe. (…they speculate that the shoe’s first owner threw it away because it has a hole in the sole).

I was up by the ice a few days ago with my TV colleague Kurt – luckily about 40 cms of snow that fell shortly before had melted away, or the trip would have been in vain for everyone — on days with snow, ”ice patch archaeologists” can’t find anything.

And at almost 2,000 metres, the season is already extremely short — it starts in mid-August and ends as soon as the autumn snows fall, usually around now. Their finds are a stark sign that the ice has not been this small for centuries: feathers or leather turn to dust within days of exposure unless they are properly preserved.

Most of the finds at the ice, known as Juvfonna, are “scare sticks” — perhaps a metre long with another small piece of wood tied to the top to flap in the wind (see picture below left for the carved end of a scare stick where string was tied). Placed in rows on the ice, they would worry the unwitting reindeer just enough to guide them towards hunters lying in wait behind rocks, without causing a stampede. The archaeologists found dozens of the sticks — even I managed to find a couple among the rocks.

Archaeologists speculate that teams of hunters came up from the valley below — probably a 10-hour slog — and left gear at altitude between hunts to avoid carrying the extra weight. Maybe one year at the start of the Dark Ages there was an especially bad early snowstorm that covered up rows of scare sticks — until now. 

Juvfonna is part of a Climate Park that says the finds are “one of the visible consequences of climate change”. And apart from rising global temperatures come natural, local shifts.

As the day wore on during our visit, the noise of water dripping and running off the ice became louder and louder,  even though temperatures were not much above freezing with a chill wind. Lars looked often at the very fringe of the retreating ice — where the most fragile finds can be made.

The archaeologists have even worked out guidelines about what to do if they ever find an ancient corpse in the ice (first rule: call the police).

In Norse mythology, the mountains were inhabited by the “Ice Giants” who battled gods such as Thor and Odin — they myths even explain that the top colour of a rainbow is red to burn the feet of giants and prevent them from climbing to Valhalla, the home of  the gods.

Now even the giants’ mountain stronghold is shrinking.

(Photos:  top – archaeologists Elling Utvik Wammer (left), Lars Piloe (centre) and Trond Vihovde (right) lay out markers to show where they have found small wooden artefacts on the ice field. Centre right: Vihovde (left) uses a GPS satellite marker on a find of a pre-Viking hunting stick as Wammer (right) watches. Bottom: the top of a reindeer “scare stick”.)