Today I got a call from a rock concert producer. "We care about climate. We want to get the audience to act. What is the call to action?" This is a deceptively simply question, but it's also THE question of our age. Meanwhile, I've been asked "what should I do?"  by audience members, by seatmates on the plane, but nonprofit heads, by pro athletes. And the answer has been blown--and continues to be blown--by the best of the climate crusaders. Gore blew it after Inconvenient Truth when the film listed a bunch of personal actions (he did include writing …

There's an unbelievable ad for Columbia's School of General Studies in the latest New Yorker magazine. It starts with the header: "I had a hunch there was more to it." Then, there's a note written on lined paper: "My life has been one of proud accomplishments -- from my success as a business owner on Wall Street to the Marathons I've run and my travels around the world. Now, my focus is on my education and learning to interpret the literary classics through a whole new lens. At Columbia University School of General Studies, I take the same courses with …

I often spend parts of my day ranting against theoreticians and conference attenders who are essentially fiddling while Rome burns. I get really tired of the theorizing and the screwing around next to the chocolate dipped strawberries outside the panel discussion. That said, I realize there is an anti-intellectual flavor to this kind of thinking, and in some level of minor repentence, and a nod to the value of research and theorizing, I want to offer up three crucial questions we need answers to that will materially move the climate and sustainability movement forward. I welcome answers here, though I …

On my first day in the classroom teaching high school math many years ago, I looked around at the dazed faces in my 7:00 AM class, and I had an epiphany: if I try to teach these guys math straight up, they won't learn a single thing. But if I make the class into a stand up comedy routine, and slide in some math along the way, at least they'll learn SOMEthing. And that's what I did. (Some of those students are out there today, struggling in low paying jobs due to lack of math background...) Along the same lines, …

(This is reposted, in longer form, from the Harvard Business Review Blog.) I'm sitting here in Aspen on the heels of the Security Forum at the Aspen Institute, where the best and the brightest pondered, for a few days, how to prevent the next 9/11. As that meeting ended, in came Ideas Fest, with the finest thought leaders in the world on the subject of ... well ... thoughts. Next up is the Environment Forum. And if I were to slack a bit and troll the internet, I could find myself on the site of Fast Company, which now lists …

Question: What are the best offsets for my company to buy to address guest travel?Answer: None. Instead, sell a "policy tag" that contributes the same amount to policy action. A friend, who's a sustainability director at a big hospitality company and one of the leading green business practitioners I know, recently called me asking what cheap offsets I'd recommend to address guest travel. Buying offsets to deal with personal plane travel, or customer travel, has really become a ubiquitous program. I have focused, in the past, on which are good, and which are bad. But after my friend called and …

We are facing an unprecedented environmental crisis in the form of climate change (with the world at its all time hottest in recorded history right now) and yet we have a firm (and I use that term lightly) called Carbon Solutions Group sending me emails like the following: (I got it this AM and I'm pasting it verbatim but with extensive snarky commentary.) In short, it says: "You can BUY LEED credits for almost nothing! Green power is getting so cheap!" Want to know why the RECs these guys are selling are getting so cheap? Becuase they're friggin' worthless! Just like …

After the BP Gulf disaster is ancient history, I want that company to thrive. I want it to be vastly more profitable than ExxonMobil. It should continue exploration and drilling all over the world, including offshore. And I'm asking for just one broad change in how the company operates: BP should donate all its profits for the rest of its corporate life. The only fair way out of the gulf spill would be for BP to become just like Newman's Own, a corporation that donates all profits to charity -- in this case, to reparations for damage done by the spill. And by staying …

I was in the rec center pool on a snowy May afternoon recently talking to my friend Dave as my kids sloshed around in what struck me as a massive inoculation tank. As usual, nerds that we are, we talked about energy efficiency in our houses. Dave recently had an energy an audit, and like me, he's got a roof made out of two-by-fours, an insulation rating of R-12. Code here for roofs is R-37, and best practice is R-49. The auditor told him: the best thing to do would be to insulate between the interior beams, and then plywood …

My friend Dean was mostly drunk rowing his raft down the Grand Canyon. He was also naked most of the time, except for a piece of climbing webbing around his waist, ostensibly to help him if the raft flipped. As he headed into the huge rapids of the Inner Gorge, Dean used to cackle and yell out: “I think I can make it!”   He was, of course, quoting Joseph Hazelwood, the captain of the Exxon Valdez.  I wonder if BP’s approach to this spill is going be a hybrid of Hazelwood’s and Dean’s: hoping for the best, but knowing …