Jon Huntsman. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

For a while there, Jon Huntsman was the one Republican presidential candidate willing to deliver the straight dope on climate change. “To be clear,” he tweeted in August, “I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.” He even argued that climate skepticism could cost the GOP a victory in November: “The minute that the Republican Party becomes the anti-science party, we have a huge problem. We lose a whole lot of people who would otherwise allow us to win the election in 2012.” Enviros praised Huntsman as the heroically rogue elephant.

Then he joined the herd.

In December, Huntsman told an audience at the Heritage Foundation that the “scientific community owes us more in terms of a better description or explanation” of climate change, and that there is “not enough info right now to be able to formulate policies.”

Since withdrawing from the GOP primary in mid-January and endorsing Mitt Romney, Huntsman has stayed visible in the media, challenging Romney’s position on trade with China and suggesting that the country might need a third party with “an alternative vision, a bold thinking.”

But has he come to any more clarity on his climate views? We called him up to find out.

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Q. You tweeted last summer that you trusted scientists on climate change. But in December, you suggested that the science isn’t very strong. What is your view on human-caused climate change?

A. I’ve always said that I put my belief behind science. When you have 99 of 100 climate scientists who are saying that there is something happening here, [and] we have the National Academy of Sciences basically saying the same thing — that’s where I tend to place my belief.

The comment I made [in December] was that there is confusion in the minds of a lot of Americans about where the science is because of the debate still going on within the scientific community. I do believe that greater clarity is needed on the subject because you can’t get good public policy without clear and consistent and scientifically backed data and climate forecasts.

Q. If 99 of 100 scientists are saying human-caused climate change is real and happening, where is the debate?

A. Well, it hasn’t translated into any kind of action within the political community because you don’t have people on a broad basis who are pushing us because they feel it’s urgent. Like, for example, debt — people are pushing the debt agenda because they see that this nation is drowning in debt. They’re not pushing a clean-energy agenda today because they just don’t see the urgency. The political policy agenda does not move unless it has people who are moving it.

Q. Are you saying the problem lies with climate scientists — that they lack urgency — or that it lies within the political community that is failing to hear the urgent message from scientists?

A. I think in many ways the whole discussion has been eclipsed by the jobs deficit right now. We are in a serious economic hole because we have a jobs deficit. There isn’t a whole lot of bandwidth for anything else.

Q. So, to be clear: The scientific community is doing its job and the political community is just not making room for it.

A. I haven’t heard the scientific community speak with a unified voice in some time on this subject matter. Maybe that’s because, again, it’s taking a backseat to some of these other more urgent issues that are economics related. I’m not following the issue today like I was several years ago.

Q. But climate scientists are saying we have to act immediately, yesterday, to solve this crisis. Do we really have time to wait for the economy to turn around to address it?

A. People running for office are generally a reflection of where they think the electorate is, and right now the electorate wants movement on jobs and on debt and not much else.

But I think the energy sector is going to be critically important to job creation and innovation and competitiveness in the next 25 to 50 years.

Q. You brought Utah into the Western Climate Initiative, and then disavowed the initiative, saying it “hasn’t worked.” Why?

A. Because it lost momentum with the business community, and therefore it lost momentum with the people in many of the Western states. There’s a question in many minds about where climate change is and what the public-policy implications are with respect to that.

Q. In 2007, you did an ad for Environmental Defense calling for a cap on carbon emissions. What do you think we as a nation should do to address climate change?

A. The most important short-term step we could take would be a rapid conversion to natural gas. It’s still a hydrocarbon, but it’s 50 percent better than oil, and it’s a step in the right direction.

Politics is the art of the possible. What is possible in today’s discussion on clean energy? It isn’t a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade scheme — I just have to be honest with you, that is not going to be viable politically. What is viable is a movement more aggressively toward use of natural gas.

Q. But scientists are saying we need solutions that will radically reduce our carbon output, not energy sources that are less bad.

A. It’s a step in the right direction on climate and in terms of energy independence. It’s a whole lot better than just managing the status quo.

Q. Do you still support a cap on carbon emissions?

A. Not if it would stand in the way of getting this economy back on its feet and creating jobs. And I have not yet heard articulated any kind of [carbon-cap] program that would do anything other than hinder our economic rebound.

Q. In the last presidential election year, climate change was almost a bipartisan issue. What has happened in the last four years? How did this issue get so polarized?

A. I don’t hear Democrats talking about it either. I don’t see it on the agenda anywhere. And the No. 1 reason is because we’ve had an economic implosion.

I used to run the Republican Governors Association and we had, almost to a person, Republicans and Democrats alike who were after the same basic solutions [on climate]. And then our economy imploded. That presented a much different reality, and we’re still stuck in that reality.

Q. But it’s more than that. You got bashed for even suggesting that climate scientists might be worth listening to. Why is there such severe pressure on Republican politicians not just to ignore climate science, but to repudiate it?

A. It’s become politicized. It’s been taken out of the scientific realm, and it’s been put in the political realm, sadly enough. People aren’t going to hear out the scientific community until such time as the economy rebounds.

Q. Do you think your position on climate change hurt you during the primary?

A. Oh, it didn’t help at all.

Q. What were some of the most surprising reactions you got from both supporters and skeptics on the campaign trail on the issues of climate and clean energy?

A. There was no desire to talk about it. If it was talked about, it was more in conspiratorial terms, which made it very difficult to have any kind of rational discussion about clean energy and our future.

Q. You supported the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. Tar-sands oil is responsible for about a quarter more carbon pollution well-to-wheel than conventional oil. How do you reconcile your support of high-carbon technology with your concerns about climate?

A. Because I compare that to the transfer of $300 billion a year to the Middle East and other countries from whom we’re importing 60 percent of our oil. If you factor in what taxpayers are footing for deployment of troops overseas and keeping the sea lanes open for oil importation, the cost of gasoline is about $12 to $13 a gallon. That is completely unacceptable. The [tar-sands] alternatives aren’t perfect, but they move us in a direction that I like from a jobs-creation standpoint and from a national-security standpoint.

Q. The hidden costs of carbon emissions could have far more disastrous effects on the national and global economy in the long term.

A. I believe [the tar-sand oil offers] far better economic and security benefits short term to this nation at a time when we desperately need it.

Q. Does America need to have an aggressive climate plan in place if we want to convince other countries like China to address the problem?

A. The Chinese are not going to follow our lead. We can say and do whatever we want and the Chinese and the Indians, Brazilians, and beyond are likely going to move as a bloc of developing countries, to their own rhythm, at a pace that doesn’t harm their emerging industries.

Q. China’s wind and solar companies are thriving, thanks in large part to massive government subsidies. What should the U.S. be doing to compete with Chinese companies?

A. First we have to ensure that they’re engaging in fair trade practices, because there have been instances of unfair dumping of their photovoltaics.

Beyond that, if we are intent on creating jobs and capturing the industries of tomorrow, then clean energy clearly is going to be one of them. It may not evolve at a pace or a speed that some thought possible a few short years ago, but it will evolve. We don’t want China owning the intellectual property rights [to cleantech innovations] and then having a superior connection to economic development in the energy sector. We also want to pursue technology and owning that intellectual property.

Q. What specifically can we do to accelerate the pace of development of our own cleantech innovation? China has set an aggressive national target for renewable energy. You set a renewable target while you were governor of Utah. Do we need a bold national renewable energy goal?

A. I think the states are probably the right place to look at renewable energy standards. And you’ve got to work as regions for purposes of having the right infrastructure to distribute clean energy, a smart-grid system — a group of regional governors figuring out the cross-border issues. And once that discussion begins, there is a role for the federal government to come in. But it’s foolhardy for the federal government to step in and manage something that’s ahead of where the states are ready to go. That would backfire.

Q. Can you foresee a Huntsman 2016 campaign with a strong plank for climate and cleantech?

A. [Laughs.] I have no idea where life’s gonna take me beyond the here and now.

Q. Will there be a critical mass of public support for these issues by 2016?

A. We’ll have to wait and see. I’ve given up making forecasts politically.

Sen. Lamar Alexander.Photo: Office of Lamar Alexander

The senator recently announced plans to forfeit his role as Republican Conference chair, the No. 3 leadership position in the Senate, so he’ll be free to reach across the aisle and work toward bipartisan solutions. “[S]ome of us have to be willing to try to get results that include coalitions,” he said. That’s a rare sentiment at a time when the Tea Party is pushing Republican politics toward right-wing intransigence.

Alexander has bucked the party line on issues like climate change (he believes it’s human-caused), cleantech R&D (he wants to plow big money into electric cars and solar), mountaintop-removal coal mining (he opposes it), and a carbon tax (he’s at least willing to consider it, even if he’s not yet endorsing it). Still, this self-described “very Republican Republican” is right in line with the GOP in his love for nuclear power and offshore drilling. He sets himself apart from both parties with his deep-seated aversion to wind power.

I spoke with the renegade senator by phone last week about his vision for America’s energy future and the role he wants to play in shaping it.

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Q. You’ve decided to leave your leadership position in the Senate to spend more time working on issues you care about, energy among them. Why is energy a priority for you?

A. I find the intersection between environment and energy the most fascinating policy work I’ve done in recent years. I’ve found myself spending 40 to 50 percent of my policy time working on these issues. We are a big, hungry, power-consuming country. We use a quarter of all the electricity in the world. In order to keep our standard of living, we need a reliable supply of cheap energy, and it needs to be as clean as possible.

Q. Can you outline your specific goals for energy policy over the next two years and beyond?

A. First, I would try to swap the money we’re spending on permanent subsidies for energy and invest it instead in research. Second, I’d like to focus these funds on the most promising areas of clean energy. I’ve devised a plan for seven mini Manhattan Projects for energy independence: solar, batteries, green building, capturing carbon, fusion, making fuels from crops we don’t eat, and finding better ways to deal with nuclear fuel.

I like [Energy Secretary] Dr. Chu’s “hubs,” as he calls them, which to me are the same ideas as my mini Manhattan Projects. His “solar hub,” for instance, has the goal of getting the cost of solar down to a dollar a watt installed [PDF]. We approved in Congress a new “battery hub” for this year, with the goal of getting the cost of electric-car batteries down to a few cents per mile for driving.

Q. How much funding from subsidies do you want to funnel into clean-energy R&D?

A. I’m reviewing that right now. So far we’ve been able to identify about $20 billion a year of energy subsidies [that could go toward R&D]. I was visited recently by a group including Bill Gates and Chad Holliday that thought we ought to increase federal support for energy research from the current level of $5-6 billion a year to about $20 billion a year.

Q. What specific energy tax breaks do you want to eliminate in order to generate these R&D funds?

A. I would start with the wind subsidies. The U.S. is already committed to spending $26 billion over the next 10 years on subsidies for wind developers. That’s a complete waste of money in my book. This is a mature technology that no longer needs government support. I also believe the oil companies don’t need subsidies beyond those that other manufacturing and producing companies have.

Q. My understanding is that oil companies get lots of special subsidies. Their capital investments in things like oil-field leases and drilling equipment are taxed at less than 10 percent, for instance, compared to the 25 percent businesses in general get taxed.

A. Well, many of the tax credits that President Obama talks about taking away from the oil companies appear to be tax credits that any company has. My feeling is, let’s let the oil companies have the same deductions as any old company — they are entitled to whatever Microsoft and Starbucks get. Beyond that, the rest of the deductions should go into energy research.

Generally speaking, my thinking has evolved to the point where if I had a dollar, I’d first put it into research and, in certain cases, jump-starting new technologies like modular nuclear reactors [with short-term subsidies]. I would not put that dollar into any subsidy that lasts more than three to five years.

Q. With so many Republicans wanting to cut spending no matter what and maintain subsidies for fossil fuels, how will you find the political will to amp up investment in cleantech R&D?

A. That’s what the political process is all about. I’m going to be the voice that says, “Let’s not let runaway spending get in the way of what we need to do for national defense and national laboratories and national research that are an important part of a pro-growth policy for our country.”

Q. The 2009 stimulus bill targeted funding for cleantech development. Was it a success in your mind?

A. To the extent that it funded research in those seven areas of clean energy I support, nuclear and so on.

Q. You’ve said that wind is a mature technology and no longer needs government support, but that nuclear does need subsidies. Isn’t the nuclear industry even more mature than the wind industry?

A. That’s a very good point. The exception to that would be the small modular reactors of which we have none in the civilian world right now. The president has recommended a small program to jump-start small modular reactors, which I support, just as I support jump-starting electric cars. And since we haven’t built any nuclear reactors in 30 years, I’d put them in the jump-start category as well.

Q. Y
ou have said that you don’t think wind energy will help reduce our dependence on foreign oil. If we were to move vehicle transportation to electricity, wouldn’t wind be one of the power sources that could replace oil as a transportation fuel?

A. I think the idea of powering the country in any significant way on wind is the energy equivalent of going to war with sailboats. It’s a preposterous notion that makes for good TV but very poor energy policy in my view. You could string gargantuan wind farms along the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine and destroy the landscape of the U.S. — that would equal the power of three nuclear reactors. And you’d still need the nuclear for when the wind doesn’t blow.

Moreover, the Department of Energy estimates that we have enough idle power in our existing plants that if we plugged our automobiles in at night, we could electrify roughly 40 percent of our cars and trucks without building one new power plant.

Q. But if we want low-carbon electric cars, we’d need to replace our grid’s high-carbon power plants with low-carbon power sources.

A. The way to come closer to that is to build 100 new nuclear plants. We’re going to have to do that anyway. About half of those would replace our existing plants over the next several years, and the other half would replace the coal plants that utilities decide are too old and dirty to put on air-pollution control equipment.

Q. Department of Energy research shows that we have enough reliable wind capacity in the central corridor and coastal areas of the U.S. to provide more than the total U.S. electricity demand, provided we find affordable power-storage technologies.

A. For now, even in the Midwest, wind turbines provide reliable power only 30 to 40 percent of the time. And it blows more at night than during the day, when we use the most electricity.

Q. At night is when we’d be plugging in our cars.

A. Again, we have all that idle electricity at night that goes unused.

It seems to me that over the next 10 years, in terms of ensuring large amounts of cheap, reliable electricity, we’ll be building a lot of gas plants, putting air-pollution controls on coal plants, looking for a way to capture carbon from coal plants, and hopefully building enough nuclear power so we can have clean electricity. Of all the renewable energies, the one with the most promise is solar, if we can get the price down to less than $1 per watt. We have rooftops for solar, and the sun shines when we need electricity most.

The senator charging his Nissan Leaf.Photo: Office of Lamar AlexanderQ. You are a strong advocate of electric cars. The EV bill you introduced last year sought to electrify half of America’s vehicles by 2030. Many EV advocates have argued that we can’t quickly move Americans off gas-powered vehicles unless we make gas more expensive. How do you think we can best make the shift to electric cars?

A. Making gas more expensive would be a terrible way to introduce electric cars to the country. What we’ve seen is that slight increases in the price of gas, even when it goes to $4, affects every level of economic activity. It’s the nature of our country: People are used to traveling long distances, trucks travel long distances to deliver food and other products. Our focus should be low cost, not high cost. The way to do it is to invest heavily in research, get batteries that will travel 200 to 300 miles per charge and are cheaper than they are today.

Q. Climate change is another issue you’ve led on. Many of your fellow Republicans, including presidential candidates, deny that climate change exists. Even figures like Newt Gingrich who were once outspoken on climate have backpedaled. Why are we seeing so much erosion on this issue? And what is needed to get Republicans and other skeptics to see the reality of the threat?

A. Well, it became a politicized issue. I believe that we have global warming, and I accept the conclusion of the National Academy of Sciences that human beings are a sufficient cause of it. If people of that caliber told me that my house had a good chance of burning down, I’d buy fire insurance. But I wouldn’t jump out the window or spend all my money on fire insurance.

I think what happened was the cap-and-trade proposal that came our way was such a big contraption and had so many problems that it was easily criticized. A better approach is R&D: gradually moving step by step toward cleaner forms of reliable energy.

Q. Are you saying that if moderate proposals for climate mitigation are proposed, more climate skeptics might be willing to recognize the reality of this threat?

A. Maybe in two to three years I think some of the politicizing which is on both sides will have died down a little bit. But it will be very difficult to get consensus on climate change in the next two to three years.

Q. You’ve also advocated a carbon tax on coal to address climate change.

A. I’ve thought about that. I’ve never put in carbon-tax legislation because I haven’t been persuaded by it. At some point we might require a certain limit of carbon on coal plants, just as we limit tailpipe emissions. But before we do that, we have to start with research and development to try to figure out a technological means to capture carbon.

Q. You’ve also taken a stand against mountaintop removal. What is the role of coal in America’s energy future?

A. It’s hard for me to see an energy future in our country without coal, but it has to be coal that is burned and extracted as cleanly as possible. The holy grail for electricity production is if we can find a commercially viable way to capture carbon from coal plants. If we can, coal will probably increase as a source of supply because we have so much of it.

Q. You’ve said that plugging in your new Nissan Leaf gives you “the patriotic pleasure of not sending money overseas to people who are trying to blow us up.” How are you liking your new ride?

A. I got it in May, after driving a plug-in Prius for two years, which had an A123 battery installed in it. I drive the Leaf around D.C. and have absolutely no problems — even driving it out to Dulles [Airport] and back. I don’t have a charger; I just plug it into the wall at night and that works fine.

Q. Do you get applause from bystanders as you roll silently down the streets of D.C.?

A. Not yet. They probably know I’m in the Congress, so they withhold the applause.

Check out our list of the top 12 women in cleantech.

But there’s one aspect of the clean-energy field that’s just as sclerotic as the world of fossil fuels: patriarchy.

Men invented, engineered, invested in, and presided over the technologies and companies that made oil, coal, and natural gas the dominant fuels of our time. And now men are running the show at most of the firms pushing renewables, efficiency, clean cars, and the smart grid. There is only one female CEO, for instance, among the companies on The Wall Street Journal‘s recent list of top 10 cleantech enterprises, and only a small minority of the companies have women in senior executive positions.

The blog VentureBeat hilariously declared the whole cleantech sector to be a “sausagefest” in which “the glass ceiling … persists,” and listed 25 top cleantech companies that have no women on their boards.

But there’s more to the story. Look a little closer and you can see that women are gradually, quietly permeating clean-energy industries. Some are running their own start-ups. Some are climbing the ranks in big companies. Some are investing tens of millions in start-ups via venture-capital firms. They are still a small minority, to be sure, but there’s good reason to believe that women will play ever greater and more influential roles in the fast-evolving cleantech sector than they ever have in fossil fuels.

“The oil, coal, and gas industries were for a long time all about heavy lifting,” says Denise Bode, former president of the Independent Petroleum Association of America and now CEO of the American Wind Energy Association. Picture grimy roughnecks driving heavy drills into the earth and soot-faced miners slinging pickaxes underground. “Even top executives had to get out in the field, overseeing these kinds of operations,” says Bode. “Women weren’t really recruited at any level.”

There’s comparatively little manual labor in the cleantech industries. Much of the heavy lifting required to harvest energy from sunlight or design the smart grid occurs inside a laboratory or at a computer. Laura Ipsen, director of smart-grid technology at Cisco, notes that the engineering behind renewable and efficient next-gen energy technologies depends heavily on IT: “There’s a lot of overlap between information technology and green technology.” So as women gain more of a foothold in Silicon Valley, that trend, in turn, is feeding women into cleantech. (Not coincidentally, nine of our top 12 women in of cleantech are working with companies headquartered in Silicon Valley or funded by investors in the area.)

Education has been another barrier to women in the energy sector. While women have almost reached parity with men in earning law and medical degrees, they’ve lagged far behind in technical fields like electrical engineering and geology. Girls are still subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) steered away from studying math and science, and are therefore unlikely to choose those majors in college. Today men still outnumber women in most fields of scientific study; in some, including physics, engineering, and computer science, women are earning only 20 percent of bachelor’s degrees, according to the American Association of University Women [PDF].

That education gap begets a workplace gap. While women hold about 46 percent of jobs in life-science and social-science occupations, including in the medical and environmental-science fields, they represent only about 25 percent of the workforce in computers and mathematics and 13 percent in engineering, according to 2010 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics [PDF].

Says Shyama Venkateswar, research director at the National Council for Research on Women, “There’s a fascinating body of data showing that women, particularly in their late 30s and early 40s, gravitate toward career paths where they can have a positive social impact, careers that give them a certain level of meaningful satisfaction, and where they can participate in dynamic, collaborative environments. That, in part, is why we see so many women in health care, for instance.”

That could also explain why more women are gravitating toward renewable energy, which is a veritable mecca for social do-gooders who also want to make money. Eugenia Corrales, who was a top engineer at Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems before she became executive vice president of engineering and operations at Nanosolar, said that at a certain point in her career, getting a generous paycheck wasn’t enough to fulfill her. She wanted to use her technical skills to “help create a society with a very different makeup.” When she entered the renewables industry, she noticed “a very different set of motivators among the people I work with. They tend to be driven by the meaning inherent in their work, by having a greater impact in society. It’s a much more respectful environment, and that may be drawing more women.”

Bode argues that “women have a particularly keen sense of what we would like to see for the next generation — in part because we bring life into the world. That breeds a certain sense of social responsibility in our work.” Bode adds that her role at AWEA is “the only job I’ve ever had, after many decades in fossil fuels, where my son looked at me and said, ‘I am so proud of you for doing this job.’ It was probably one of the greatest achievements of my career to date.”

Bode also posits that women are well-suited to the renewables sector because it requires cooperation. Virtually every emerging “green” technology — solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, smart grid, green homes, electric cars — is part of a dynamic network of solutions; one alone can’t serve all of our energy needs, but together they create a synergistic whole. “Women are hardwired to cooperate, to be interconnected,” Bode says. “Maybe it’s a lack of ego, maybe it’s an inherent wisdom that we can achieve more together than we can alone, but in general, women tend to work well as a team.”

“Fossil fuels represent silver-bullet solutions,” Bode continues. “Renewable energy technologies represent silver-buckshot solutions. I think women can relate to and get behind that buckshot idea on a fundamental level.”

Marianne Wu, a partner at the venture-capital firm Mohr Davidow who specializes in cleantech, agrees: “I shy away from gender stereotypes, but I do believe women at large are good bridge-builders — we’re good at building connections and putting pieces together. In the world of cleantech, a lot of different disciplines come together
to form one ecosystemic whole. I think that makes sense to us.”

Ipsen also spoke of the “massive coordination challenge” in the cleantech sector. “We’re good not just at connecting the dots between the different solutions, but between those solutions and the larger issues that relate to them — issues of policy, the environment, and the global economy.”

On a more practical but no less significant level, women comprise a majority of the consumer end market that is investing in making households more sustainable. Lynn Jurich, CEO of SunRun, notes that when she sells solar power to homeowners (her company has so far worked with some 12,000 households), the “buyers are typically females — often the husband has no idea what the energy bill is. You have to make the green product work within the wife’s household budget.” As a result, adds Jurich, a new generation of female consumers is becoming educated in emerging cleantech products for the household, a trend that may in turn drive more female interest and talent into these industries.

For now, women have a long way to go before they hold an equal share of leadership positions in cleantech companies. If and when they do, it may not be just because they’re getting better technical and science education, or because they’re seeking more meaning and social responsibility in their work, or because they’re good at building bridges and developing “buckshot” solutions. It may also be for the grim reason that women tend to thrive in crisis, and crisis is ultimately what’s driving the growth of cleantech industries. Eleanor Roosevelt once said that “women are like tea bags — we don’t know our true strength until we are in hot water.” Her insight may prove eerily apropos at a time when humanity is steeping in ever-hotter water.

Check out our list of the top 12 women of cleantech.

While the cleantech sector is very much a boy’s club, women are starting to break down the clubhouse door. Meet 12 of the most savvy and accomplished interlopers. Some are building their own start-ups, others are climbing the ranks in big companies, still others are plowing millions into new clean-energy endeavors via venture-capital firms. All of them, we hope, will inspire more women to get involved and take charge in industries that are changing how we power our lives, how we get around, and ultimately how we cope in a climate-changed world. 

Lynn Jurich
President, SunRun

Twelve thousand American homes now have solar panels thanks to 31-year-old Lynn Jurich, and she’s set her sights on millions more. In her 20s, during summer hiatus from Stanford business school, Jurich went to China to work at a bank and found “the air so polluted that I couldn’t see the sun.” It struck her then that “energy is the greatest problem my generation has to solve.” She returned to the states to join a biz-school cohort in founding SunRun, a start-up with a deliciously simple premise: more people would switch to solar if it were easy. SunRun does all the hard stuff — it selects, buys, installs, and services each of its PV systems, and muddles through the complexities of permitting, net-metering, and tax credits. All a homeowner has to do is provide a rooftop for the installation and sign a fixed-price, long-term contract to purchase the carbon-free electricity the panels produce. Four years after it was founded, SunRun now commands 10 percent of the residential solar market and operates in nine states. The company, which installs $1 million worth of solar equipment each day, grew 300 percent in 2010 and is poised for similar growth this year.

Envaya helps people in Africa build ultralight websites, on the ultracheap.

These and other effects of global warming, which might otherwise go undocumented and unnoticed, are being recorded on Envaya.org, an online network designed, at the most basic level, to connect third-world populations to the web.

Even people who live hundreds of miles from a cable, a phone line, or a paved road, and who subsist on a few dollars a week, can use Envaya’s ultralight platform to establish websites. The site is geared toward community organizations working to address issues ranging from deforestation and climate change to sexual abuse and special-needs education. It links these groups to each other, to potential funders, and to the rest of the world.

Envaya aims not just to help connect the 2 billion-plus people worldwide who currently have no access to the internet, but to help these populations build the foundations of civil society. It could also help super-charge the global environmental movement — knitting together local but fast-growing collectives of activists who are planting trees, protecting waterways, promoting biodiversity, and encouraging sustainable agriculture throughout the developing world. With internet access available and easy to use in low-connectivity environments, decentralized groups could form a unified front against global warming.

Envaya was cofounded just over a year ago, in mid-2010, by 27-year-old Joshua Stern. After graduating Stanford in 2006 with a BS in computer science, Stern forsook Silicon Valley to enlist in the Peace Corps. At the age of 23, he was posted to the island of Pemba, part of the Zanzibar archipelago off the coast of Tanzania. No more than a handful of people among the largely Muslim population of roughly 350,000 had ever touched a keyboard, let alone typed an email. Stern and his team of fellow volunteers built computer labs in schools, hospitals, and community centers, installing dozens throughout the island. They trained hundreds of students, parents, and teachers in the very basics — how to double-click, hunt-and-peck type, use a search engine.

During this time, Stern recognized two trends. First, the penetration of telecom in the region was surging. Companies like Vodacom, Tigo, Airtel, and Zantel entered East Africa in the early 2000s, and by 2008, some 20 million of Tanzania’s 40 million population had cell phones or USB devices that enabled laptops and computers to connect to the internet via cellular link. The problem was a huge software gap. There were no tools or interfaces that could readily be used by people with limited computer skills in low-connectivity environments (the cellular connections had limited bandwidth and are, to this day, often slower than dialup).

Meanwhile, a grassroots activist movement was building throughout Tanzania and East Africa. Thanks to relatively stable governments, community organizations were springing up by the hundreds, addressing a broad range of civil society concerns from the environment to education, public health, and the arts. And yet these groups had no way of publishing research, sharing information, following each other’s progress, and connecting to funders and lawmakers.

Envaya cofounders Jesse Young (left) and Joshua Stern (right), with Radhina Kipozi, the group’s Tanzania program manager.Enter Envaya — a tool designed both to bridge the digital divide and eliminate barriers to social action. Focusing on design challenges that demanded easily usable but technically sophisticated features, Stern teamed up with fellow Stanford computer-science grad Jesse Young to develop software designed to be ultralight, allowing users to publish content, connect with each other, and collaborate in a low-bandwidth and low-tech environment.

Envaya profiles are meant to serve as complete and functional websites for users. Like Meetup.com, the software allows participants to organize conferences and events. And like Facebook, the software allows people to create and define their identities. But while Meetup is limited in function to event planning and does not work well on low-bandwith, low-tech equipment, and Facebook is a social network for individuals, Envaya is a functionally versatile and open network of civil society organizations.

Currently Envaya has been deployed in Tanzania alone — the country where Stern had established relationships with citizens, foundations, and government officials during his Peace Corps experience — and there it has been going gangbusters. Led by social entrepreneur Radhina Kipozi, the Envaya team on the ground in Tanzania has trained local volunteers in computer literacy and outreach. Since the site’s debut in Tanzania in mid-2010, 350 organizations have joined. The website’s environmental outreach has been spearheaded by Jeff Schnurr, who also founded Community Forests International, which has helped plant more than 100,000 trees on the island of Pemba.

The “offline” impact for Envaya’s users has been subtle but significant: The Africa Climate Change Initiative in Dar es Salaam has been following environmental groups on Envaya to develop a national climate-change strategy based on local experiences. Schurr’s Community Forests International has, through Envaya, connected with dozens of other tree-planting groups throughout Tanzania to share best practices for saving seeds, accessing seed banks, and replanting.

The first step for Envaya has been simply getting organizations like these online. As Stern and Young expand to new countries — Rwanda and Kenya are next, with pilots in several others to follow — they will, with the help of the open-source community, be designing more sophisticated collaboration tools, communication tools, vertical specific tools (for certain kinds of organizations), mobile payments, and GPS tools for monitoring and reporting phenomena such as tree growth and crop developments. These tools that will be built with the same “ultralight” and simple but elegant approach inherent in Envaya’s core technology.

As these tools develop, Envaya could play a key role in emerging carbon markets. GPS-enabled mapping and reporting tools could help verify where trees are being planted, where forests are being protected, and how much carbon is being stored through those efforts. Envaya’s transparent network might also help monitor the exchange of carbon credits and ensure that the people who are working to protect and grow forests are seeing the rewards. Similar mapping tools could also enable agriculture experts in wealthy nations, for instance, to monitor and investigate crop failures in remote regions of the developing world and provide solutions to poor and rural farmers.

Envaya is not about markets; it’s about the groups that are working to promote change, building a sense of community and fellowship, and helping larger institutions function. That said, Envaya could have a big impact on markets. The more people connect to the internet, the more they start to see the internet as a way of doing business — and the more businesses can connect to them. From the standpoint of the Googles, Amazons, eBays, and Facebooks of the world, Envaya can be a way of connecting billions of developing-world civilians to the internet, which will ultimately facilitate fast-evolving markets.

In a sense, civil society can be thought of as a dominant industry in the developing world, and serving those needs will help drive economic development as a whole. Envaya can help identify good projects on the grassroots level, and facilitate their connection to larger organizations that can provide decisive support. Consider the challenge of reliable electrical power in Tanzania and throughout the developing world, one of the critical problems handicapping economic development. Envaya can, for example, connect a local community-based organization looking for ways to power a new water pump to an NGO focused on solar power. It can, in the bigger sense, serve as a bridge between people on the ground who know what they need and companies and foundations that can provide equipment, services, and expertise.

In the long run, Envaya could have more influence in the fight against climate change as a shaper of markets than as a tool for grassroots activists. But Stern is aware that markets won’t function unless the societies within them are functioning. For now, Envaya’s focus is not on building revenue streams but on building tools that can ultimately help societies — and ecosystems — in the developing world thrive.

This piece was adapted from the Forbes.com “Power Trip” blog.

Jonathan FranzenPhoto: Greg MartinJonathan Franzen’s blockbuster novel Freedom has been called the War and Peace of our day. Is it also our Silent Spring?

Reviewers have almost unanimously lauded Franzen for capturing the early-21st-century American zeitgeist. Time knighted him the “Great American Novelist.” Oprah picked Freedom as her final book club selection. New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani described the novel as “an indelible portrait of our times.”

What reviewers have almost unanimously ignored, however, is that this indelible portrait of our times is also an indelible portrait of contemporary environmental activism rendered through the protagonist Walter Berglund. Walter — introduced on page one as “greener than Greenpeace” — is a car-phobic cyclist who works at The Nature Conservancy, frets about overpopulation, develops homicidal feelings toward bird-eating housecats, and at times prefers warblers to his wife. When Walter’s passion for one rare warbler species leads him to consider a Faustian deal with a mountaintop-mining coal company, we watch him confront the absurd tradeoffs that have come to define modern environmentalism.

In interviews and essays, Franzen has made no secret of his own devotion to the natural world, and has even confessed to wearing a birding bra. I recently met with the author at his apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to tease out the environmental themes in his book, discuss how environmentalists can be more effective, and quiz him on his bird knowledge (watch video of the quiz). I left Franzen’s apartment thinking that this great American novelist also deserves recognition as a great American activist.

Q. Is Freedom an activist book? Do you hope that readers will come away with more of an appreciation for the natural world after reading it?

A. In general, I try not to do overt advocacy with my writing. If it’s a byproduct, and people become aware of an issue because it’s part of the story I’m telling, that’s great. But it’s not the primary motive.

The one small part of the book that had an actual activist motive was the very end, where we’re introduced to a predatory housecat that’s running outside and killing songbirds by the scores. When it occurred to me that I could end the book with the main character Walter’s problems with this cat, I realized that I could also perform an educational service. Most people aren’t aware of the degree to which free-roaming outdoor cats are a problem in this country. At least a million birds a day are killed by them, so we’re talking about a minimum of 365 million birds in America alone in the course of a year — perhaps as many as a billion. So there was an educational impulse there.

Q. I found your “My Bird Problem” essay in The New Yorker to be moving and persuasive. I finished it and thought, “Man, I need to go scout some birds!” Walter’s a birder, but his relationship to birds isn’t attractive in the way that your own birding stories are. Do your activist motives play out in your nonfiction more than in your fiction?

A. It’s a tricky thing. As a reader, as soon as I sense that I’m reading a piece of straight-up environmentalist advocacy, I put the piece of writing down. I feel like I’m already the converted, so don’t try to convert me. Tell me something interesting.

Even in nonfiction, I don’t want to take a purely advocating stance. I’m trying to complicate things. “My Bird Problem” is an essay about how I went from a general pissed-off concern about the environment to a very specific, positive passion for birds, which are part of the environment. Of course, it was also an opportunity to bring along readers who might not have thought about birds so much before. That’s a real and potentially useful secondary effect. But my primary responsibility to the reader is to say, “Look, this stuff is complicated — trust me, I’m not here to beat you over the head.”

Q. Your book presents a spectrum of environmentalists: on one end, the Jocelyn Zorn character, a radical purist; in the middle, there’s Walter, the soggy, old-school, bike-riding pessimist; then you have Lalitha, the fresh, pragmatic, tech-savvy optimist. Where do you see yourself on that spectrum?

A. I am involved with the American Bird Conservancy, which is an incredibly effective environmental outfit. We don’t have a huge budget, but we have amazing leverage in getting other people to spend money to do things to help wild birds in the Americas. And one of the things I’ve learned through my involvement with ABC is how painful the compromise process can be for people doing hands-on environmental work.

There is a place for radical stances — Greenpeace with the whales, some of the anti-mountaintop-removal stuff going on in Appalachia. And you can actually sometimes succeed by taking the really hard-line position. But much more often, if you talk to the people doing the work and getting things done, it’s a gut-wrenching compromise every day. You have to cultivate extremely wealthy people. You have to cut very imperfect deals with industry. People have said to me, about Freedom, “Oh, you must be satirizing this poor Walter Berglund who gets corrupted when he sets out to do good.” In fact, what I was after was a purely realistic portrayal of contemporary conservation work in Appalachia.

Q. You’ve said Freedom is your first non-satirical work of fiction. I did interpret Walter as a satire — as the desperate, failing, wacky environmentalist who’s saying let’s chop down mountains and destroy rivers to save this one rare bird. Do you think it’s realistic to blast mountains and destroy river systems to save a bird?

A. That’s a tough call. How do we continue generating electricity in this country? You want more nuclear? You want to cover this country with wind turbines? Wind power’s impact on wildlife alone is very, very substantial. The impact on the sense of there being an outdoors that isn’t just a factory for power is radically altered if you cover the landscape with turbines. Natural-gas drilling also has a huge negative impact. It totally fragments the habitat. It renders it unusable to the most sensitive species, which are the ones we’re most concerned about. And everyone’s talking about MTR [mountaintop-removal mining] in Appalachia while the gas drillers there are having a field day. So the question is really, really complicated.

Walter comes to feel that coal is maybe not so bad. He sees that we aren’t going to stop using coal in this country, and he asks, “Why don’t we talk a
bout how to do it better, how to do it right, rather than taking extreme positions that feel good but have no realistic alternative solutions to offer?” His position is not my position, exactly — I’m an agnostic on this stuff. But I don’t actually think it’s a crazy position to take.

Q. Do you think that environmentalists, in general, are unwilling to engage in the kind of pragmatic compromise you’re describing?

A. I used to have a really angry, despairing sense that the world is screwed, that people have screwed the world, and so we should just let it all end. Let’s have the great plague that will reduce the population by 90 percent, and let the land regenerate and nature catch its breath. I’ve moved away from that sort of deep-ecological extremism, which I found to be not personally tenable. It was time for me to stop thinking about apocalypse, time to move to New York City, time to start enjoying life. And from there I moved on to loving wild birds, which was a much more positive mode of engagement. I started to think, what can we do for wild birds right now? I don’t want these particular species to disappear. So what can I do practically? If you’re trying to save your child’s life, you might make certain compromises that you would have found morally insupportable at a younger age. Love leads to pragmatism in a way that anger doesn’t.

Q. There’s an episode of South Park in which Prius drivers are emitting “toxic levels of smug.” Do you think that the environmental movement is failing to reach people because it gives off too much of an air of judgment?

A. It’s certainly a danger. There’s a moment at the very end of Freedom where Walter, instead of attacking his neighbors for letting their cats roam, suddenly takes the new approach of getting a biologist to lead nature walks for his neighborhood. It’s a huge breakthrough for him, to actually show the neighbors what’s in the woods. He’s saying, essentially, “I don’t hate you. I don’t hate your cats. I just love these woods and the birds in them, aren’t they beautiful? Might you think twice about your behavior in the light of that?”

As long as nature remains an abstraction, or some kind of moral whipping post, people aren’t going to connect their actions to the effects they have on nature. If environmentalism is trapped in a we’re-doing-good-you’re-doing-bad dichotomy, it misses the chance to be effective, to actually change people by making them care about something instead of react against something. Real change occurs when people begin to positively care.

Q. Walter’s friendly nature-hike approach instantly depoliticizes the issue. It’s celebratory.

A. It’s celebratory, it’s depoliticizing, and it’s not abstract. One of the big problems for people who want to do something about climate change is that the welfare-of-your-grandkids argument is totally abstract. Ditto Bangladesh flooding. That’s a long way away. Who cares? You can threaten people by telling them that bad things are going to happen to you. But it smacks of Protestant morality: “You’re sinning, and you’re all going to hell. You’re sinning against the environment, and the hell will be an environmental hell.” And so the smugness of the environmentalists is maybe akin to the smugness of the saved: “I’m walking around saved!” “I’m walking around in my hemp shoes!”

Q. Why did you choose to focus on overpopulation instead of climate change? Overpopulation is, some might say, a dated environmental issue, while climate is on the front of everyone’s mind.

A. I had already touched on climate change in my two previous novels. And as a novelist you don’t want to be chasing after the culture — you want to be listening to stuff that’s not being talked about but that might become important. A novelist tries to go to places that people don’t normally want to go. And it was interesting to me how totally unmentionable overpopulation has become in mainstream conversation. If you imagine the entire culture as some kind of psyche, you wonder: “Why is this rather important knowledge being repressed? Why are we willfully blinding ourselves to this?” Repressions like this are a provocation for the fiction writer.

Q. Do you think that overpopulation may become a bigger concern than climate change going forward?

A. I’m not Walter on the subject of overpopulation. Birth rates tend to decline when nations reach full development. A number of countries in Europe now have negative birth rates, and the U.S. population right now would be stable were it not for immigration. The U.N. commissions see world population peaking, all other things being equal, sometime in the next 50 years, and then trending downward.

The question is whether there will be anything left in the world to save by the time that happens. Practically speaking, it all depends on resource consumption. A hundred Americans do a lot more damage to the environment than a thousand Sudanese.

But Walter’s concern isn’t practical as much as it is poetic. He’s responding in a visceral way to the crowdedness of the planet, to a feeling that there is no other thing left, there is only us. We’ve made this planet a human theme park. He’s responding to the symbolism of every last acre of the planet being somehow meddled with and made into just another backyard.

Q. At one point Walter freaks out and shouts, “Humans are a cancer on the planet!” Was that cathartic to write? Do you agree with him?

A.You know, on a bad day, taking a drive and trying to find some place that isn’t covered with sprawl, I feel like we’ve experienced cancerous growth rates. There once were these functioning cities, there was farmland, there was the wild. It seems like there was once some kind of balance. When you see sprawl plotted out on maps, it really has this cancerous look.

But was writing that cathartic? Not really. Again, I don’t want to write stuff that harangues people. I don’t want to preach. For me, the kind of work that’s satisfying is to set up a book in which issues I care about are presented in a complex way. In all modesty, I feel I did a good job of representing what it’s like to try and do environmental work now. Careful and entertaining representation is what feels good to me, not the rant.

Q. I found it interesting that Walter’s relationship to the natural world becomes increasingly passionate as his personal life unravels. Do you think that devotion to the natural world can be socially isolating — possibly even a form of emotional dysfunction, an escape from human relationships and problem-solving?

A. If you take a devotion to other species to its logical conclusion, you reach a point of pretty radical misanthropy. And my job as a novelist is to care deeply about human beings, to find their psychology and their stories and their plight compelling.  One of my aims in Freedom was to find a way to express some of the radical misanthropy, but also to knit it into a matrix of human relations, to put it in context, to put it in perspective.

Q. What advice would you have for anyone — writer, journalist, activist — who is trying to engage and move people on an environmental issue?

A. Nowadays I get sent a lot of books that are extremely well-meaning exposés of environmental issues, and also books that are celebrations of the beauty of nature. Strangely, I am so much a humanist that it’s very hard for me to get interested in these thing
s. The best way to engage me is to find interesting ways to talk about yourself and your relationship to the world. To trick me, basically. Interest me in your human story, and then, once you’ve got the thing going, start working in the information that I might otherwise be resistant to. Engaging people on the environment is really, really hard. You should never underestimate the difficulty.

Q. There has been an enormous amount of response to Freedom, but almost no response to the environmental themes. Why?

A. I don’t know why. Maybe interviewers are trying to do me a kindness and not scare away readers by making the book sound too environmental.

Q. Was Oprah receptive to the environmental themes of the book?

A. We didn’t talk about it at all. But the producers did offer to put a link to the American Bird Conservancy on the Freedom webpage.

Q. Could you share a memorable bird-sighting moment?

A. We’re sitting here in my apartment in New York, and I’ve seen about 40 species of birds out the window in back. It just faces a courtyard — we’re right in the middle of Manhattan. Interesting things come through in migration. I glanced out the window one afternoon and saw what I thought was a mourning dove. But something about the tail shape was all wrong for mourning dove, and so I got out my binoculars, and what did I see?  A yellow-billed cuckoo! Cuckoos are basically tropical species. We only have two species that migrate north in the summer, and to see that bird in the middle of Manhattan was incredible.

Q. How many birds are you up to now?

A. In North America, maybe 630.

Q. How many more do you have left to go?

A. Anything over 700 is considered kind of great.

Q. So you’re almost there.

A. The last 70 are the hardest 70.

Q.  And when you’ve seen them all, then what?

A. I want to do what I can to help ensure that Americans will always have these birds to see.

Watch Jonathan Franzen play a bird identification game with Grist’s Amanda Little:

Watch more video clips from Grist’s interview with Franzen, as part of Ask Umbra’s Book Club discussion of Freedom:

• Franzen on whether caring about the environment can lead to social dysfunction and “radical misanthropy”
• Franzen on environmental compromises and energy options
• Franzen on overpopulation
• Franzen on cats killing birds, and talking about environmental issues to the unconverted

San Francisco’s AT&T Park is one of several professional sports stadiums saving energy and money by going green.Photo: Wally Gobetz

As the San Francisco Giants celebrate their 2010 World Series triumph, they’re quietly coveting another, humbler feat — one that’s perhaps no less historic in the long run. The Giants are one of the greenest teams in professional sports, and they’re proving that sustainable practices fatten the bottom line even as they ease the burdens on the planet.

Their stadium, AT&T Park, which accommodates about 45,000 fans, runs its scoreboard on solar power, recycles and composts nearly 50 percent of its waste, sources eco-friendly napkins, containers, utensils, toilet paper, and the like, and has enough efficiency features to cut the stadium’s annual energy and water bills in half. That amounts to huge savings, given that stadiums can consume as much energy as small cities.

The Giants are on the front end of a trend that’s quickly gaining traction in Major League Baseball and the NFL and NBA. Teams are stepping up recycling and efficiency in their facilities, attracting lucrative corporate sponsorships with green messaging, and raising consciousness among fans. If the trend continues to build in the next two years, we may find that games do more to push environmental progress in the U.S. than politics. 

Especially now, given the acrimony in Washington, professional sports may have a broader and more profound influence than any other single entity on American mindsets, slicing through socioeconomic and political divides. “More than 150 million Americans — half our population — regularly follow professional sports,” Allen Hershkowitz, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), told me. Hershkowitz founded the NRDC project greensports.org, a pro-bono consultancy that advises teams and leagues on sustainable strategies.

For nearly a century, professional sports have galvanized social movements and ginned up American patriotism. Baseball, for instance, desegregated a decade before the nation did, helping catalyze the civil rights movement. Women’s basketball and softball leagues were organized before women had the right to vote.

Today environmental advocacy is getting big play in ballparks, even though it’s facing crippling barriers in the Beltway. During the playoffs and throughout the World Series, Robert Redford loomed large on Jumbotrons. “The coming decade may be our last chance to head off environmental crises like global warming,” he intoned between innings in a public service announcement for the NRDC. “We can choose a different future. But we’ve got to do it quickly. And each of us must play a part.”

If you talk to team executives, they seem less interested less in the ethics of sustainability than in the economics.

“I’m not going to try and convince you that it’s all about altruism,” said Jason Pearl, the Giants’ managing vice president of corporate sponsorship and new business development. “This is very clearly a benefit to our bottom line.” The net positive isn’t just the savings on energy, water, and waste disposal, which will more than pay off the initial investment in efficiency measures. Pearl can leverage the Giants’ greening strategies to grow existing sponsorships and attract new ones.

PG&E, the utility that supplies power to two-thirds of California, worked with the Giants to retrofit their stadium, and then built a significant branding campaign around that effort. “They see us as a platform to execute their energy-efficient programming,” said Pearl. “At the same time, our fans are a great audience for advertising that effort.”

The Giants have also attracted or expanded green sponsorship deals with Canadian Solar, LINC Corporation (which provides heating and air conditioning), and Centerplate (a hospitality company that provides food to sports stadiums). It’s a virtuous circle. “We’ve been able to use green sponsorship dollars to drive opportunities that, in turn, attract more green sponsorship dollars,” said Pearl.

It might seem obvious to pursue this sort of strategy in markets like San Francisco, which has an exceptionally high Birkenstocks-per-citizen ratio. But similar stories of green branding success are emerging among teams in Atlanta, Boston, Houston, and other not-so-obviously-green markets.

The Boston Red Sox, which have begun converting their 100-year-old Fenway Park into a green stadium, have built green sponsorship deals with Waste Management, National Grid, and Poland Springs. “Poland had a bull’s eye on them in terms of the plastic bottles backlash,” said Troup Parkinson, the team’s vice president of client services, “so they came to us with a proposal to do a major recycling campaign at the park. It was a win-win — two forward-thinking brands working together.”

The Atlanta Braves, a team that has cut its energy bills by $350,000 a year with stadium retrofits, built a similar green partnership with Coca-Cola. The company placed giant recycling receptacles shaped like Coke bottles throughout Turner Field to collect the tens of thousands of PET bottles that are thrown away at each event; Coca-Cola then recycles those bottles into a synthetic fabric used to make the uniforms for 2,000 stadium staffers. These uniforms, bearing the dual logos of Coca-Cola and the Braves, also display a number indicating how many recycled bottles it took to manufacture the garment. The program has generated so much buzz among Braves fans that the team and Coca-Cola are discussing a merchandise line made from the stadium’s recycled bottles.

The list of green sponsorships extends well beyond baseball. In the NFL, the Philadelphia Eagles built a state-of-the-art green stadium that has saved more than $5 million in energy bills since 2005. The team also decided to source green products from its suppliers, and when its longtime partner Kimberly-Clark didn’t come up with the right offerings, the Eagles switched to SCA-Tork, maker of napkins, bathroom tissue, and other paper products. Not only does Tork now provide stadium supplies, it has signed on to a seven-figure sponsorship deal to advertise these efforts.

In the NBA, half a dozen teams including the Utah Jazz, the Portland Trailblazers, and the Phoenix Suns are developing state-of-the-art green facilities and, in turn, forging green marketing campaigns with sponsors ranging from Orbit Sprinkling Systems to Allied Waste. Some teams are also offering green incentives for fans such as ticket discounts for those who travel to the game via public transit.

The twin benefits of energy savings and sponsorships are good news in an industry that has been suffering from low ticket sales. Last year, Major League Baseball sold 1 million fewer tickets than it did in pre-recession 2007. The NFL and NBA have also seen sharp drops in their ticket revenues due to strained household budgets.

With this in mind, the greening trend in professional sports makes good sense — why wouldn’t a team want to cut its energy bills and seek alternative revenue streams during an economic downturn? As for potential sponsors, what company these days doesn’t want to green its image, whether it’s selling corn chips or cars?

And yet, for every green sporting stadium that’s being built, there are two more that are going in the opposite direction. The new Dallas Cowboys stadium, for instance, is an energy-guzzlin
g colossus averaging $200,000 in monthly utility bills and consuming about as much power as Santa Monica, Calif.. (A conventional scoreboard, on its own, can devour as much electricity annually as 100 homes.)

There’s certainly a long way for professional sports to go — only a small percentage of teams have joined the greening trend. And the strategies that have been pursued so far have glaring blind spots, such as fuel use. Sports teams have extensive travel schedules, covering as many as 34,000 miles in a season.

I asked representatives of the NFL, NBA, and MLB if their commissioners might consider mandating league-wide energy-efficiency practices: Could teams be required to cut the energy demands of their stadiums, just as they’ve been exhorted to participate in league-wide campaigns to fundraise for cancer research and fight childhood obesity? Could divisions be restructured so that teams play neighboring teams within set regions for most of the season, as they did long ago, slashing travel miles? All responded, in so many words, No.

At a time of federal paralysis on energy and climate legislation, our push for progress must happen from the ground up, in our schools, churches, cities, states — and sports teams.

Let’s applaud the pioneering teams that are greening professional sports. Let’s also encourage them to do more, and demand similar practices from those that have yet to join the movement. The reality is, we’re not getting positive environmental action from our elected leaders, but we might be able to get it from our players. For now anyway, they’re more popular than our politicians — and perhaps more influential.

My home state of Tennessee has been solid red for nearly 20 years. So red that it famously spurned Al Gore, its own homegrown political celebrity, in the 2000 presidential election, favoring Dubya by a wide margin. Now President Obama’s popularity is faring even worse in these parts. Recent Tennessee polls estimate the commander in chief’s approval rating at roughly 30 percent. So it’s a curious political paradox that our outgoing Democratic governor, Phil Bredesen, is ending his eight years in office with an approval rating of 72 percent.

More surprising than Bredesen’s success at being a blue governor in a red state is that he’s managed to be a successful green governor in a red state. “On energy and the environment, Bredesen is by far the best governor the state has ever seen,” says John Noel, board president of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and a top environmental strategist in the Southeast.

Outgoing Tennessee Gov. Phil BredesenTennessee has had its fair share of environmental troubles, including the catastrophic coal-ash spill at a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant two years ago. TVA is one of America’s dirtiest utilities, and Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains National Park is one of our most polluted national parks. But since assuming office in 2002, Bredesen has managed to make significant green progress. In addition to protecting more than 350,000 acres of Tennessee wilderness from development and taking a stand against mountaintop-removal coal mining, Bredesen has helped Tennessee rise to third in the nation for clean-energy job creation, closely trailing Colorado and Oregon. He has lured, quietly and without fanfare, some 20 new clean-energy manufacturing ventures to Tennessee, representing $2.9 billion in investment and creating more than 2,000 jobs producing photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, electric cars, and cellulosic biofuels. All in all, Tennessee has added roughly 130,000 manufacturing jobs under the Bredesen administration, nearly 20 percent of which are green.

It may then strike you as ironic that the candidate heavily favored to replace Bredesen in the Nov. 2 election is the former president of Pilot, a Knoxville-based petroleum company that operates a chain of truck-fueling stations. Republican Bill Haslam captained Pilot for 13 years before he was elected mayor of Knoxville in 2003. During his tenure at Pilot, he grew the company, which was founded by his grandfather, from 80 to more than 300 truck stops in 39 states. Pilot has come under environmental fire for racking up 50 state and 20 fed­eral vio­la­tions of con­t­a­m­i­na­tion rules for petroleum stor­age tanks.

Republican candidate Bill HaslamThe Tennessee race is not much of a contest: Haslam has a 28-point lead over his Democratic opponent, Mike McWherter, a beer distributor with no political experience to speak of, aside from being the son of a former Tennessee governor. Haslam has been outspending the Democrat seven to one.

David Ewing, a Nashville lawyer and political strategist, says the end of the Bredesen administration coincides with an overall shift to the right in Tennessee politics. “The Democratic party will no longer have a governor in Tennessee after November,” he predicts. “Both United States senators are Republican, and with open seats in Congress, a majority of Tennessee’s delegation in the House will probably also be Republican.” The already conservative Tennessee state legislature is also trending rightward.

This trend does not, on the face of it, bode well for my state’s environmental and energy future. Haslam lists 10 priority issues on his website — “keeping taxes low,” “protecting our second amendment rights,” “conservative fiscal leadership,” and “illegal immigration” among them — and environment, climate change, and energy are nowhere mentioned. For his part, McWherter, who has been endorsed by Bredesen and Bill Clinton, briefly cites the clean energy sector in his job-creation plan, but makes no reference to the environment or the climate.

Democratic candidate Mike McWherterYou might think green messaging would be more prevalent in a state that that is No. 3 in green-jobs creation nationwide and veritably booming with clean-energy development, but that sort of talk doesn’t sell in Tennessee. Noel put it this way: “If you polled the voters in this state about their position on climate change and environmental issues … well, let’s just say, I’d be afraid to take the poll.”

That may explain why, as several high-level state environmentalists have told me, Haslam may actually be downplaying his green sympathies. Though he hails from the oil biz, he seems to recognize the promise of a clean-energy economy.  ”He’s greener in practice than he seems in message,” said Harvey Abouelata of the group Energy Efficiency of Tennessee. For one thing, Haslam contributed $1,000 to Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 1988. And as mayor of Knoxville, Haslam has made a big push for solar and efficiency. In recent years, 2 megawatts of solar panels have been installed on city buildings — more thanin  any other South­eastern city — and Knoxville has earned a Solar Amer­ica City designation from the U.S. Department of Energy. The energy-saving steps Haslam has implemented on government buildings have reduced the city’s annual energy costs by more than $1 million. He’s also been known to commute to work by bike and recently allocated $20,000 for bike-route improvements.

At the same time, however, Haslam has said almost nothing about climate change (he declined to join more than 1,000 U.S. mayors in signing the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement), and he’s put little funding into public transportation.

In a recent interview with Haslam’s campaign manager, Mark Cate, I asked about the candidate’s stance on climate change.  Cate danced around the issue, acknowledging global warming as “a concern”; when I pressed him on whether Haslam had outlined a strategy to address climate change, the answer was a flat “no.” It was clear from my interview with Cate that Haslam would not support a state renewable energy standard or greenhouse-gas regulations, and would not participate in a regional cap-and-trade program.

Then again, Bredesen hasn’t pushed for an RES or greenhouse-gas regs either — they’re politically implausible in a state with an increasingly right-leaning legislature. Enviros are holding out hope that what Haslam lacks in climate strategy, he could, like Bredesen, make up for in green-jobs strategy.

Bredesen offered incentives to Nissan to build a giant manufacturing facility outside of Nashville that will produce lithium-ion batteries to power the all-electric Nissan Leaf. An existing Nissan auto-assembly plant in the area will produce the Leaf itself. The two projects represent an investment of $1.7 billion and will create up to 1,300 jobs when both plants are operating at full capacity. To further show his support for the industry, Bredesen is offering $2,500 rebates to the first 1,000 Tennesseans who buy electric cars. The governor also reeled in big-fish solar projects. He helped convince Hemlock Semiconductor and Wacker Chemie, both of which produce the polycrystalline silicone components of solar panels, to build multi-billion-dollar facilities in the state. Meanwhile, Sharp, one of the largest solar producers in the U.S., expanded its already-existing solar-panel manufacturing facility outside of Memphis. The growth of the solar industry in Tennessee has drawn a number of manufacturers of component parts: AGC Flat Glass, which makes glass for solar panels; Shoals, which makes electrical components for solar panels; and Confluence Solar, which makes mono-crystal silicon ingots.

Cate applauded Bredesen’s success with clean-energy industries and suggested that Haslam would carry it forward.  “Haslam’s priority is to build the economy of Tennessee,” he said, “and green jobs are an important part of his plan.” But he shied away from making promises or establishing targets for the growth of the clean-energy sector.

The good news is that Bredesen has made the case loud and clear that green really is green — and therefore both red and blue — in Tennessee. If the next governor of our state wants to achieve Bredesen’s 72 percent approval rating, he’ll be smart to continue nurturing and luring cleantech businesses, and keep Tennessee on the frontlines of the new energy economy.

Newt Gingrich, green conservative.Photo: Gage Skidmore

In his new book To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine, Gingrich pushes a strikingly different view, decrying “the doomsday theory of climate change,” which he attributes to the “high-tax, big-bureaucracy, job-killing, and government-centralizing environmentalism of the Left.”

A vehement critic of the Obama administration — opposing its approach to the Gulf oil spill, energy and climate legislation, and much else — Gingrich calls for a “green conservatism — a new pathway to environmental stewardship.” He characterizes this philosophy as “optimistic, positive … entrepreneurial, market-based, and incentive-led.” He calls the Tea Party movement “a good way to spread green conservatism.”

Gingrich is busy these days promoting his book — and himself.  He’s mulling a 2012 presidential bid, planning to make a decision on whether to run by spring of next year.  I spoke with Gingrich recently by phone about BP, global warming, green conservatism, and Rwandan gorillas.

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Q. What’s your take on the BP spill and the response of the Obama administration?

A. The president has been floundering. The U.S. government underestimated the scale of the disaster for the first couple of weeks after the spill. Then you have a complete failure to coordinate potential resources from foreign countries that offered assets that could have helped cope with the oil flow. I don’t think the government even understood what they were being offered because the bureaucracy is so incompetent and the disorganization is so complete.

Q. What would you have done differently?

A. You’ve got to fundamentally overhaul MMS, the Army Corp of Engineers, and the Coast Guard’s emergency response system. You have to rethink these agencies because our current bureaucratic structure does not allow modern technology to get into the government very rapidly. So you’ve got long-term civil servants who may have been technically capable 25 years ago but they are now in the new world with new technologies and very often don’t understand what they are dealing with.

Q. Would you also tighten the safety standards for offshore drilling and require stricter enforcement of these standards?

A. They’ve got to look very carefully at what actually went wrong. We frankly don’t understand fully what went wrong.

Q. Do you think the safety measures are adequate as is?

A. I don’t think we know.

Q. In your book, you say a core theory of green conservatism is that “wealth and freedom generally lead to better environmental practices.” BP had loads of wealth and freedom — then it ignored safety measures and the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded. How do you reconcile this?

A. Well, sometimes greed and stupidity undermine the benefits of wealth and freedom. BP should be required to pay every penny of the cleanup and be held accountable for all the damages done to any party by this disaster. That provides a signal to other companies: Don’t be stupid.

But wealth and freedom as a general rule make it possible to produce more things better. There are over 30,000 wells in the Gulf — we’ve had one blowout in 30,000 wells. I think you learn from the mistakes. You figure out new and better approaches and you go back and try again.

Q. So are you saying that wealth and freedom sometimes confer environmental benefits, but in this case they didn’t?

A. In this case there was a mistake. And you’re going to have mistakes.

Q. How can we prevent these kind of mistakes if not with better regulatory oversight?

A. You try to ensure that the best [drilling] practices are followed. But you also have to recognize that sometimes there will be things that happen that you can’t control. It’s like having car wrecks. You have to build a response system.

Q. Do you think greed and stupidity are a part of human nature?

A. Sadly, yes.

Q. How can wealth and freedom confer the greatest environmental benefits if humanity is fundamentally greedy and stupid?

A. Political systems also have greed and stupidity. But they are more centralized and politicians have more power.

The point isn’t that wealth and freedom will lead to utopia. The point is, if your choice is between greed and stupidity in bureaucracies and greed and stupidity in free markets, as a general rule, free markets produce greater wealth and greater opportunity for more people.

Q. What is your position on climate change? How much of a threat do you think it poses?

A. It’s an act of egotism for humans to think we’re a primary source of climate change. Look at what happened recently with the Icelandic volcano. The natural systems are so much bigger than manmade systems. I am very dubious about claims that we know precisely what’s going to happen. And I’m very suspicious of the use of those claims to create much larger governments with much greater bureaucratic controls over our life.

Q. In 2008, you appeared in an ad with Nancy Pelosi in which you said that America “must take action to address climate change.” Why have you flip-flopped?

A. I haven’t flip-flopped. The actions I would take would include nuclear power and the use of renewables. For much less cost than what Al Gore wants to spend, you can incentivize dramatic changes.

Q. I’m sorry, I’m confused. You’ve said on the one hand you’re not sure climate change is human-caused. On the other, America should take action to address climate change.

A. I think the carbon of the atmosphere is something we should deal with. To give you an example, if you had the same percent of American electricity from nuclear that you get in France, you would take 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year out of the atmosphere.

Q. You have applauded CEOs of GE and Duke Energy and Wal-Mart and other major industry executives for leading environmental progress in the country. These same executives are supporting a regulatory cap on carbon, saying they need federal regulations that provide market certainty.

A. What they are really telling you? They’re telling you they are so afraid that the Environmental Protection Agency will be used that they would rather have a law than have the Environmental Protection Agency make their life even more miserable.

Q. So you think these people actually aren’t concerned about climate change and don’t support a cap on carbon emissions?

A. I’m just saying there are a lot of people who are driven to take positions because they are genuinely afraid the government will make their life even more miserable through regulatory devices.

Q. You vehemently oppose a cap on carbon emissions. Economists say that greenhouse gases are imposing costs on the public that the emitters aren’t paying. Why should the public have to pay these costs?

A. Creating a regime to regulate carbon emissions would profoundly change the entire economy and guarantee the export of an amazing number of jobs to China and India. I regard the cap-and-trade bills as full employment acts for China and India.

Q. Your energy proposals consist largely of incentives — essentially, subsidies. You’ve also fought efforts to remove subsidies from fossil fuels. If you support free, open, and competitive markets, shouldn’t you support removing subsidies that distort the market?

A. Not if you believe that a low-cost energy regime is essential to our country — both in terms of its internal transportation cost and its competitiveness in the world market.

Q. Fossil fuels are not low-cost when you consider their external toll on national security and the environment.

A. I don’t think you can find any rational economic model that cuts the use of carbon by 83 percent in the time frame people are talking about without crushing the American economy.

Q. You have supported nuclear, solar, wind, smart grid, and other emerging technologies. Do you see incentives as the only way to push these markets to evolve?

A. Absolutely. There’s no evidence in American history that regulations and punishments work to create a better future.

Q. The Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act are widely lauded as successful legislation. Would you support rolling them back?

A. Depends on what you mean by rolling back. 

Q. Do you think the government should have specific targets for clean water and clean air that can’t be surpassed?

A. Not necessarily.

Q. You don’t think a law should say the air has to be X percent clean?

A. No, I don’t.

Q. You describe yourself as passionate about the environment. What experiences in your life shaped your commitment to this issue?

A. Growing up, I loved the natural world. I wanted to be either a zoo director or an invertebrate paleontologist when I was young.

Q. You argue that many environmental problems have been ignored due to what you call “the global warming obsession.” What do you think are the biggest environmental challenges we’re facing?

A. We have a substantial biodiversity problem, particularly in the Third World where I think there is a grave danger that you’re going to lose an amazing number of keystone species like mountain gorillas. We have to create economic policies that sustain those habitats. Local people have to have an investment in the preservation of species or it won’t happen.

My wife Callista and I went hiking in Rwanda in February and went up to look at mountain gorillas at about 9,500 feet, and many of the people who were with us — porters helping us do the trek up the mountain — had formerly been poachers. So the wilderness skills that had made them effective poachers turned them into effective guides.

Q. In your book you call for citizen leadership to protect the environment. What do you do in your personal life to promote sustainability? What kind of car do you drive, for instance?

A. I drive a hybrid, if that helps anything.

Q. And your home?

A. All I can tell you is I’d bet you a great deal of money that the carbon footprint of my home is radically smaller than Al Gore’s. I’ll leave it at that.

Homes in Nashville.Photo courtesy Eric Hamiter via Flickr

On stoops and porches around the city, Nashvillians are sharing stories of shock, anguish, and wonder. They are recounting images of the homes and churches that were torn from their foundations and carried away when the river surged; of the waterlogged cars and buses that quietly floated down flooded highways like sheep in a migrating herd; of the asphalt roads, sidewalks, and driveways that peeled off the ground like fragile skins.

The stoop chatter celebrates the lives of hundreds of survivors who clung to tree trunks and car roofs or were rescued by boats from rooftops and second-story windows. And it mourns the deaths of 21 residents who succumbed to the raging floodwaters.

My family got off lucky: The 4 feet of water that flooded our basement only claimed storage boxes, a boiler, and a furnace — never creeping up to the first floor to damage our living space. Some of our friends weren’t so fortunate. The muddy waters snaked into their ductwork and entered their kitchens, bedrooms, and dens, warping their floors and leaving a foul residue on furniture, clothes, bed linens, and baby cribs.

Photo courtesy ahoy matey via FlickrI joined a group of cheerful volunteers — there are thousands of them citywide — buzzing around flood-stricken homes, scrubbing walls, ripping out sodden ductwork, boxing up whatever belongings can be salvaged, and transplanting families to temporary dwellings. Conversations often veer toward recent natural disasters that have come to seem absurdly frequent: the earthquakes in Haiti, China and Chile that took so many lives; hurricanes Katrina and Gustav; and the northeastern blizzard in January.

“It feels like the earth is mad at us,” said one volunteer.

But few people I’ve spoken with mention global warming. They’re focused, understandably, on the immediate tasks at hand — managing the day-to-day challenges of cleaning up wreckage, filing insurance claims and relocating. But in the coming months, as Nashvillians reflect on this shock, we may conclude that we’ve gotten a firsthand glimpse of the symptoms of a warming planet.

I don’t believe that this particular storm was caused by climate change. After all, major storms are expected this time of year in the Southeastern U.S. But the unprecedented intensity of this storm — which produced the largest volume of rainfall from a single storm on record in the state of Tennessee — is closely tied to warming climate trends.

Dr. Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Division at the National Center on Atmospheric Research, explained the phenomenon this way: A warmer climate means warmer oceans and moister air, which in turn intensifies storms. “Global warming contributes to higher air and sea temperatures,” he said, “as a result you get increased moisture in the atmosphere and more intense rainfall events.” He pointed to governmental data showing a 20 percent increase in heavy precipitation in the past 50 years throughout the Southeastern region of America.

Until now I have understood the power of nature — specifically, the power of water — only in theory. It cuts chasms into rocks as vast as the Grand Canyon. It turns boulders into fine sand. But I never quite grasped its ability to swallow homes and rupture human lives. Even after Hurricane Katrina, which I observed from afar, I didn’t actually feel — or understand — the human impacts of a natural disaster. Maybe you never do until you can smell and touch those impacts; until you try to help pick up the pieces of lives forever changed by them.

Perhaps only then — only when a critical mass of Americans have seen and felt the human impacts of a changing climate — will we devise a bold national strategy to address the root causes of global warming and prevent more extreme weather events in the future.

In the meantime, Nashville has an opportunity to lead: As we gird for the next big flood by installing sump pumps and drainage systems, we can also try to prevent it — by reducing our climate impact — by wrapping our boilers and sealing the cracks in our walls that cause our homes to leak heat in the winter and cool air in the summer; by installing affordable energy-efficient lights and appliances.

Yesterday, my husband and I replaced the 18-year-old furnace in our heating system that broke in the flood. We invested in a superefficient model that gets a $1,500 federal tax credit and negotiated a reasonable two-year financing plan. It will save us money in the long run, significantly cutting our heating bills while shrinking our carbon footprint.

The city of Nashville is not just a federal disaster area, it is a federal opportunity. As we pump floodwaters from our submerged streets, we must also devise sweeping strategies to reduce our climate impact and create green jobs. Nashville can do more than recover from this tragedy — we can become a stronghold of new, green innovation.

That will do more than prevent further disaster, it will create jobs, strengthen our economy — as a city, state, and country — and build our national morale.

This piece was originally published by AOLNews.