Articles by Mark Pawlosky

Green, Inc. author says big environmental groups have sold out to big business

For my money, there’s nothing more delicious than a book that lays bare the rot of a corrupted industry from an insider’s perspective. In the hands of a skilled observer, the subject can spring to life. Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis’s hilariously disturbing account of Wall Street’s investment-banking industry in the late 1980s, comes to mind. […]

A chat with Philip V. Adams of the World Green Exchange auction system

Last week, World Energy Exchange, an online energy trading platform, officially launched a new marketplace for renewable-energy certificates and greenhouse-gas permits. The World Green Exchange employs an auction system -- think eBay -- to bring buyers and sellers together. In theory, auctions create a more transparent marketplace and drive out cost inefficiencies by directly connecting the buyer and seller and removing the middleman.

We caught up with World Energy President and COO Philip V. Adams last week to find out how the launch went and why he thinks WGE will stand out in an increasingly crowded field dominated by the Chicago Climate Exchange in the U.S. and European Climate Exchange and European Energy Exchange overseas.

Grist: Congratulations on launching the World Green Exchange. I know it's only been up and running for a couple of days, but is it attracting users and working as you had hoped so far? How will you measure success longer term?

Adams: Thank you. The World Green Exchange was formally launched last week, but in fact we have been conducting transactions on the platform for the past several months. We're a bit of a conservative firm, and took the view that we would have real client success in the marketplace before making an announcement of our capabilities. As we suspected, the auction approach is performing very well. In several transactions conducted to date, we have significantly bettered benchmark prices that were derived to our clients who were using brokers or bid-ask exchanges.

Another day, another trillion dollars for the clean-tech industry

It seems that a day doesn't slip by without someone raising the stakes in the alternative-energy poker game.

The most recent bombshell wager: Cambridge Energy Research Associates report that alternative energy investments will -- hold on to your hats! -- top $7 trillion by 2030. That's an audacious number by any measure, and normally it would be enough to suck the oxygen right out of a convention of wind-farm enthusiasts. But that's not the half of it. The most startling aspect of the report is that it barely raised a ripple in the investment community.

And why should it?

Q&A with Eric Janszen on whether an alt-energy bubble is in the making

Eric Janszen, the founder and president of iTulip.com, recently argued in Harper's Magazine that the alternative energy segment is a prime candidate for a massive asset bubble, potentially dwarfing both the dot-com and housing bubbles. I wrote about Janszen's prediction last week. This week, Janszen joins us for a question-and-answer follow-up.