Climate Technology

Should emissions from employee commutes be included in company GHG inventories?

When businesses dip a toe in the rising sea of corporate action on climate change, the first box they check before diving in involves tabulating their own greenhouse-gas inventory. In getting your corporate house in order, the first step is defining where your yard ends and your neighbor's begins.

The good news: There is a clearly accepted international standard providing guidance to companies sorting "what's in" and "what's out" for their GHG inventory. The Greenhouse Gas Protocol: A Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard is the playbook everyone is working from.

The bad news: Some issues are more clearly defined in the guidance than others, leaving individual companies to sort out their own best way forward.

Emissions from employee commutes are one such gray area. In these early days, how leading companies come down on this issue is critically important in setting a precedent. The GHG Protocol does provide general guidance on this issue, but more specific direction is needed.

Mood in the hood

John Hofmeister, President of Shell Oil Company, was on Charlie Rose Tuesday night.

About 22 minutes into the segment, he says the following [my own transcription]:

If we don't drill more in this country, I am quite concerned about civil disturbances in our urban areas because of the price of fuel.

...

I was meeting in Los Angeles with mayor Villaraigosa and I asked him a specific question because I lived there during the Rodney King civil disturbances. [I] said, "How is the mood in the hood based upon the price of gasoline compared to the mood in the hood at the time of the Rodney King disturbances?" He said it's threshold.

Let us drill or those people will act all crazy again! You know how they can be when it comes to things like this.

And they say environmentalists are alarmist.

Carbon taxes work when there’s substitutability and revenue is locked down for environmental goals

This is a guest post by Monica Prasad, who wrote an op-ed in Tuesday's New York Times called "On Carbon: Tax, Don't Spend." It elicited responses from David Roberts and Charles Komanoff.

 

A call to action: Street Speakout Seders

The traditional Passover Haggadah teaches that in every generation, some Pharaoh will arise in destruction, and that in every generation, every human being -- not just every Jew -- must look upon herself or himself as if it is we -- not our ancestors only -- who must go forth to freedom. In this generation, what Pharaoh do we face, and what freedom must we seek?

 

Cost of solar cells may be driven down dramatically

Well lookie here! A series of manufacturing process improvements could make the cost of electricity from silicon-based solar cells comparable to today’s prices for coal generation within about four years, according to a company emerging out of stealth today. The company, 1366 Technologies, will be using technologies developed in MIT labs to reduce the manufacturing […]

Software calculates eco-impact of printers and copiers

Xerox is offering a new software calculator to help companies reduce the energy suckage of printers, copiers, and other newfangled technology. The calculator will consider factors including type of print cartridge, print color, speed, number of pages printed per month, and Energy Star rating, then create bar graphs demonstrating energy consumption, greenhouse gases, and solid […]

Americans want to spend on green, but can’t figure out how, says study

Americans are primed to spend up to $104 billion on “green” technologies this year — but don’t know where to find them, says a new study. Which seems crazy, considering the plethora of green-shopping websites and companies joining in on the “green revolution,” but what do we know? According to the survey conducted by Rockbridge […]

NYT offers special section on green biz

The Sierra Club is embarking on its first product endorsement, putting its logo on Clorox’s new Green Works cleaning products. Various businesses are aiming to bypass carbon neutrality and move straight on into carbon negativity. These and more stories show up in a New York Times “Business of Green” section Wednesday, which covers the green-biz […]

What investments should be made with carbon tax revenue?

Monica Prasad had an op-ed in The New York Times yesterday called "On Carbon: Tax, Don’t Spend." It’s … peculiar. This basic pitch: "if reducing emissions is the goal, then a carbon tax is a tax you want to impose but never collect." That is to say, per the headline, you Don’t Spend the tax […]

A factor of 3.67 makes a big difference when discussing climate

The biggest source of confusion and errors in climate discussions probably concerns "carbon" versus "carbon dioxide." I was reminded of this last week when I saw an analysis done for a major environmental group that confused the two and hence was wrong by a large factor (3.67). The paragraph I usually include in my writing:

Some people use carbon rather than carbon dioxide as a metric. The fraction of carbon in carbon dioxide is the ratio of their weights. The atomic weight of carbon is 12 atomic mass units, while the weight of carbon dioxide is 44, because it includes two oxygen atoms that each weigh 16. So, to switch from one to the other, use the formula: One ton of carbon equals 44/12 = 11/3 = 3.67 tons of carbon dioxide. Thus 11 tons of carbon dioxide equals 3 tons of carbon, and a price of $30 per ton of carbon dioxide equals a price of $110 per ton of carbon.