Climate Technology

Finance, energy, and the environment: markets and opportunities

Last night, I went to a panel at the Museum of American Finance on Wall Street (no, really!) on what's financially hot or soon will be in non-coal, non-oil energy technologies. I love these kinds of events; typically, what comes of them is reality-based information, dealing with who has the money, where it's going (or ought to go), and what will get it there, in order to transform our energy system. I come away from these things more hopeful than from any number of political rallies, because these are people who are walking their talk instead of posing in their Rogan jeans and "Save the planet" t-shirts.

The panel was co-sponsored by Sierra Club, so the articulate Carl Pope was one of the speakers, natch. The other speakers were Pete Cartwright, CEO of Advanced Power Projects, Inc.; Daniel Abbasi, head of regulatory and public policy research for MissionPoint Capital Partners ("Financing transition to carbon free economy"); Michael Molnar, VP at Goldman Sachs, responsible for alt. energy and coal sectors in the Energy & Materials Equity Research Business Unit; and moderator Myron Kandel, founding financial editor at CNN.

You can read my liveblog-style notes for the whole evening at my own blog. A few juicy nuggets:

Home Depot announces an end to traditional pesticide sales in Canada

For consumers concerned about pervasive toxics in the environment, this has been a very good Earth Week.  Especially if you live in Canada.

Home Depot announced this week that it would stop selling "traditional" lawn and garden pesticides in all its Canadian stores.

The reason? Consumers don't want them anymore. People in Canada seem to have discovered that you don't need to spread poisons around your yard in order to garden. Amazing! A huge part of that awakening is happening because of committed advocates, particularly from the public health community, that have helped lead hundreds of local by-laws in communities around Canada that have ended the use of "cosmetic" pesticides on lawns & gardens.

I am trying to imagine what it would be like to walk into the garden aisle in a big-box home improvement store without the noxious bags of granulated death ... I think I like it.

The bell is tolling in Canada for lawn & garden pesticides. I hope we catch whatever they've got.

Social concerns complicate an issue that, for scientists, is a no-brainer

A couple of months ago, I wrote a piece, now posted at Seed, about a financial mechanism for reducing deforestation and degradation (REDD) and vaster territory it will likely prime for pricing ecosystem services.

It's fun to watch the story evolve, as now we're seeing the U.K.-based Canopy Capital sign an agreement to protect a 371,000 hectare chunk of tropical forest in Guyana -- in advance even of a market infrastructure to value all the services provided by this land.

For the most part, I see action in this direction as a good thing. Certainly the climate scientists, conservationists, and environmentalists who support "natural capital" schemes have their heads and hearts in the right place. But in the course of reporting for the story, I uncovered a tier of concerns missing, for the most part, from popular media coverage of the subject. Indigenous rights groups and NGOs are highly concerned [PDF] about the implications of what amounts to leasing their land to foreign investors.

Michael Dell offers a glimpse of an unannounced product

Michael Dell is on stage now, going over the importance of IT for sustainability and the many worth initiatives Dell has undertaken — all of which you can read about on Dell’s site. The one newsworthy bit was the presentation of what he calls, with a distinct lack of poetry, "the unannounced product." It is […]

College grads hit the green job market — here’s what they’ll find

Photo: fluffbreat Another Earth Day has come around, and that means college graduations are just a few weeks away. Soon-to-be alumni throughout the nation are dusting off résumés, poring over job listings, and then moving back into their old bedrooms at home “for a little while.” I predict a progression of messages from dear old […]

Walt Disney Co. gets into nature

The Walt Disney Company has announced a new film division that will focus on nature documentaries. The creatively named Disneynature will aim to produce two films every year starting in 2009, hoping to catch the interest of some of the viewers who flocked to Warner Bros.’ March of the Penguins and the Discovery Channel/BBC series […]

Feds set fuel-economy benchmarks for automakers

Federal regulators will propose benchmarks Tuesday for automakers to hit on their way to reaching a fuel-economy requirement of 35 miles per gallon by 2020. Auto fleets will have to average 27.8 mpg by 2011 and 31.6 mpg by 2015 — a more aggressive timetable than was required by Congress. That’s 35.7 mpg for passenger […]

All-electric car coming to the U.S. next year

Reasonably priced, all-electric cars are coming soon to a California near you. (And then to the rest of the U.S. before too long.) Think Global, which was sold by Ford Motor Co. to Norwegian investors in 2003, will partner with two venture capital firms to mass-produce the battery-powered Think City in the U.S., starting next […]

New server farm projected to use 103 MW of power

Interesting feature in the March issue of Harper's if you missed it: Google's server farms use a heckuva lot of energy. A planned server farm in The Dalles, Ore. will probably use 103 megawatts of mega-hydro electrons, enough to power 82,000 homes, according to the author, Ginger Strand. Server farms used more power than TVs in the U.S. in 2006, and this may increase as other search firms gear up to battle Google. Of course, the proliferation of flat-screen energy hogs since then may level that playing field ...

But the point here is that internet search isn't impact-free, and Google's good efforts to develop the renewable industry through grants and investments might be better viewed as more of an offset for its own impacts.

Private equity firm buys rights to rainforest reserve’s environmental services

This picture of what appears to be an insect with rainbows flying out its butt was taken in Guyana.

There are untold, untapped, unknown chemistries created by millions of years of evolution harbored in what remains of the planet's biodiversity. This is a vast storehouse of information, which would provide humanity with centuries of medicines and other benefits if we can just find ways to preserve it.

We can't let our biodiversity disappear -- one interesting (and gross) example of its importance is in this video I found on YouTube, documenting one of the unending evolutionary struggles between lifeforms. We are also locked in an evolutionary struggle with microbes. Many of today's most important medicines got their start in nature. Penicillin and its derivatives, for example, came from a mold.

Mongabay has a hopeful article about an equity firm betting on the future:

"How can it be that Google's services are worth billions, but those from all the world's rainforests amount to nothing?"