Climate Technology

Bank of America makes a $20 billion green pledge

Not long ago, I became a Bank of America customer, with mixed emotions. You know, the faceless corporation, the rumors of unethical practices, the exhaustion of trying to figure out where their (and my) money truly goes. Ultimately, I gave in to inertia and convenience. So I’m happy to hear that BOA is launching a […]

Group Hug

Leading tech competitors bury the hatchet to improve energy efficiency Hold onto your geek hat: 11 leading tech companies have partnered to reduce the energy used by servers and data centers. The Green Grid — made up of foes including Intel, IBM, Microsoft, AMD, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett-Packard — thinks data-center efficiency “is the most […]

An interview with IKEA sustainability director Thomas Bergmark

Green by design. Photo: IKEA Last week, IKEA U.S. announced a “bag the plastic bag” initiative: the retailer will charge a nickel for plastic bags to discourage their use, donating all revenue to the nonprofit conservation group American Forests. The store will also let shoppers walk away with one of its iconic reusable blue bags […]

Did your pick win?

With over 20,000 people participating, the votes have been cast for the 2007 Global Warming Globie Awards. And the winners are:

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels (Best Performance by a State or Local Official)

US-CAP (Best Performance in the Corporate World)

An Inconvenient Truth (Best Film, Documentary, or Website Focusing on Global Warming)

ExxonMobil (Worst Performance by a Corporation or Corporate Official)

Senator James Inhofe (Most Egregious Contribution to Public Ignorance and Denial)

Check out the site for more details and honorable mentions.

Plights of the Roundtable

International business group joins chorus begging for emissions regulations Yet another group of businesses has come out in support of international greenhouse-gas regulation. The Global Roundtable on Climate Change, which includes nearly 100 large companies, issued a statement Tuesday espousing an increasingly common belief: “If we delay too long in beginning the changeover to increasingly […]

Premature Surrenderation

Fighting the new defeatism on climate change In Beltway media circles, among pundits who nod at one another with furrowed brows on cable TV, a new consensus is congealing: global warming is real, but there’s not much we can do about it, since efforts to substantially reduce emissions would destroy the world economy. These bed-wetters […]

Environmentalism’s confusing accounting

The L.A. Times published an interesting if somewhat odd piece in last week's magazine about efforts to coax the business community into loving the environment by assigning a dollar value to our natural resources, or "ecosystem services."

So, for example, we learn that dung beetles provide $380 million of waste management services to the U.S. cattle industry. One mile of coastal wetland provides $2.4 million of storm protection. A nice fern is worth $4, or you can get 3 for $9.99.

I made up the last one.

The odd part of the article is that it wraps together these efforts to place a concrete value on natural resources with a very different phenomenon: the use of pollution markets to curtail environmentally damaging activities.

Romance blossoms between big biz and enviros over a candlelit dinner

Love is in the air. Photo: iStockphoto The on-again-off-again flirtation between big business and the mainstream environmental movement seems to be progressing into a full-on steamy love affair — and perhaps even a committed, long-term relationship. On Tuesday morning, a handful of Fortune 500 execs joined Jonathan Lash, president of the environmental think tank World […]

With big biz jumping on the green bandwagon, should activists cheer or jeer?

“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” It’s time for greens to co-opt corporations. Photo: iStockphoto If so, then the growth of the green economy — embraced by corporations, […]

Model Summer Rayne Oakes quizzes him on socially responsible investing

In this guest post, model and sustainable business consultant Summer Rayne Oakes recounts her recent interview with socially responsible investing expert Thomas Van Dyck. (Read more about Oakes in a Grist profile.)

I first met Thomas Van Dyck in June 2005 during the height of San Francisco's World Environment Day celebrations. It was a brief two-minute introduction wedged between a chaotic green trade show and a trippy drum-circle gathering. All I managed to find out during that time was his job description: investment consultant. In my mind, I lumped him in with the typical French-cuffed, Ferragamo-tied, Rolex-wearing beings I see on my occasional sojourns to Wall Street. I couldn't have been more wrong.

As I learned after running into him a few more times, Thomas Van Dyck is one of the top socially responsible investment (SRI) consultants in the business. He happened into the field in the early '80s, while working as an environmental activist, and he's helped to shape and grow SRI ever since. Van Dyck and his team, who work in the heart of San Francisco's Financial District, consult on close to a billion dollars in assets, with clients ranging from foundations, unions, and pension funds to entrepreneurs and celebrities. Ninety-nine percent of his clients have at least one socio-environmental screen on their portfolios, and the vast majority has multiple screens. In addition to his investment work, Van Dyck founded As You Sow in 1992, a nonprofit organization that uses shareholder advocacy to push for more enlightened corporate practices.