Obama – Biden: New Energy For America

Jason Grumet, lead energy and environmental advisor to Barack Obama, knows that the shift to a green economy cannot be done alone.  “The American people need to communicate the value of job creation.  Obama has said that he can create 5 million jobs, but 5 million is a crazy big number.  Write a letter to the editor, or to local policymakers, explaining how we can create 14 jobs.”   For years a loud minority has been scraping and clawing to build out the cleantech education strategy at Babson College.  In the past three years that loud minority has grown to a deafening majority, and within the last year alone the school has added an Environmental Entrepreneurship class, a Green Consulting program, and created a Cleantech Entrepreneur in Residence position on the Board of Overseers.  These successes in cleantech management education need to partnered with commitments by trade schools, community colleges, and even private sector manufacturing organizations to develop the skilled green collar labor force that will be the foundation of our new economy. Obama’s roots are in community organizing; with him and his 500 person energy staff working from the top down, and everyone else working up from the bottom, hopefully we can meet somewhere in the middle, at the crossroads of economy and ecology.

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As I traversed the country last week, a few things became quite evident about middle America: The plain states love Jesus, hate any meal not smothered in bacon, and despite the thousands of wind turbines that have gone up in the past few years, some folks still don’t quite have a grasp on the green movement. I pulled up to a motel somewhere west of St. Louis around 4 a.m., and despite my grogginess, I couldn’t help but notice the sticker on the door advertising something called “EcoRooms.”  The pamphlet at the front desk stated “Appealing to today’s environmentally conscious guest, these rooms are designed to be environmentally friendly – using less energy and fewer disposable items.” Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see where leaving the lights on and the air-conditioning set to “arctic” fits into “using less energy.”  Judging from the number of cars in the parking lot, it was conceivable that both had been running for hours, if not days.  These blunders, while inexcusable, were probably the fault of one or two individuals, and likely didn’t warrant an open letter blasting America’s Best Inn & Suites as Greenwashers.  The Styrofoam cups on the dresser and in the breakfast buffet, however, were a completely different matter. I mean, Styrofoam?  How is this product still in existence?  Even decades before the green movement took off, weren’t we all pretty clear on the fact that Styrofoam is about as environmentally friendly as the Exxon Valdez?   Granted, these products are cheap; you can still order 1000 Styrofoam cups for around $59.95 (plus 5% of your soul).  Most establishments have moved towards recyclable paper or plastic cups, which are priced comparably to Styrofoam; but then you have to wonder what percent of recyclable goods actually end up in a recycling bin.  For as little as $.03 more per cup, companies like SunTerra, The Green Office, NatureWorks, Fabri-Kal (makers of GreenWare)  and VegWare can provide zero impact disposable products. If you live in a few select places like Boulder or San Francisco, none of this comes as any surprise, as biodegradable disposables are in every coffee shop and most eateries around town, most of which either do onsite composting or at very least separate compostables for recycling.  For years environmentalists have been pushing consumers to recycle plastic, but the US still lags behind most other modernized countries (and many not so modern) in terms of recycling ratios.  Moreover, while recycling certainly slows the production of petroleum based plastics, the Foodservice Packaging Institute estimates that we still use 39 billion items disposable cutlery, most of which are manufactured from petroleum.  This new wave of disposable goods offers an economic, eco-friendly alternative to conventional goods. The brilliance behind compostable products is the circular nature of their life cycle.  These products are made from plant matter, often forged with corn or potato oil, a process which reduces the use of fossil fuels by over 95%.  Once the product is used and discarded, it is composted, ultimately ending up as fertilizer to aid in the growth of crops.  As such, Ecotainers, or GreenWare, as they are often referred to (though both names are trademarked… we’ll see which one sticks and becomes the Band-Aid of the market), provide environmental solutions on the front end, by being organically produced, and the back end through composting.  The end result is a 200% reduction in greenhouse gases compared to conventional petroleum based products.  Even if an Ecotainer is thrown away rather than composted, it still has less than half the environmental footprint of a discarded plastic cup, and many multiples less than Styrofoam.   There are still plenty of companies that still use Styrofoam, so on the surface it may seem a bit vindictive to single out this one particular motel west of St. Louis.  However, as I mentioned in my last article, companies all over the country are spending millions of dollars on legitimate greening practices in order to market themselves as environmentally friendly.  This is exactly why the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System exists: to provide a third party verification system for ensuring that consumers who make purchases based on green practices are not going to end up with a stack of Styrofoam cups or a hotel room as cold as Dick Cheney’s heart.   If you live in the Northeast and have a tendency to imbibe coffee, it’s unlikely that you’ve been able to make it this far without tossing a Styrofoam Dunkin Donuts coffee cup in the trash.  With 7,900 locations worldwide (though sometimes it seems like they have that many in Boston alone), Dunkin Donuts is the second largest domestic retailer of coffee by the cup, selling approximately 2.7 million cups of coffee per day, and almost 1 billion per year.  If you purchase anything larger than a 10oz beverage you will receive it in a creatively decorated Styrofoam cup, which will happily inform you that “America Runs on Dunkin.” 

The cup fails to mention that this Styrofoam cup, along with about 2 million others like it, will end up in a landfill by the end of the week. Dunkin Donuts is by no means completely oblivious to the environmental movement, announcing in May that they will break ground on their first LEED certified restaurant in St. Petersburg, FL.  This is a major step for this organization, and one can only hope that it is the first of many steps.  A move to Ecotainers would not be cheap (approximately $29 Million per year), but for a company on pace to break $6 Billion in sales this year (63% of which is coffee), such an investment is hardly out of the realm of possibilities.  Besides, if Americans are already willing to pay $3.75 for a Latte, who’s to say we won’t pay an extra three cents for one of these.

Want to compost at home?  Check out my handy guide.  

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Ingredients:

• 1 Plastic Bin (with lid).  Surface area is more important than depth, but you’ll probably want something small enough to fit underneath your sink.
• Shredded Newspaper (no color).  Best to use a paper shredder, but hands work ok too.  About 1 Sunday New York Times worth should suffice.
• Worms!  The best worms for composting are red worms, either Eisenia foetida or Lumbricus rubellus.  Worm Mans Worm Farm will sell you 1000 worms at the reasonable rate of around $25.
• Compostables.  You can compost fruit and vegetable scraps and peels, coffee grounds, tea bags and rinsed out, crushed up egg shells.  Avoiding meats, dairy products and oily foods will help prevent against odors, flies and other pests.

Process: Drill about 12 – 16 holes in the plastic bin, about two thirds of the way up from the bottom.  This will provide oxygen to aid in the compost process.  Some people also puncture holes in the bottom to allow for drainage, though if you're keeping this under your sink you may prefer to skip this and avoid dealing with a drainage system altogether. Run the shredded newspaper under water until it is thoroughly soaked, then ring it out so that it is moist, but not dripping.  Spread about half of this newspaper evenly along the bottom of your bin, then dump your worms over the paper, distributing them in a similar manner.  Finally, cover your worms with the remainder of the shredded, damp newspaper. Maintaining Your Compost: There is very little to do to maintain a compost, though after a few months you will have a buildup of finished compost that can be used as fertilizer, and most of your original bedding (newspaper) will be gone.  The best way to replace the fertilizer with new bedding is to move all of the finished compost over to one side, then replace the bedding on the other side and begin adding compostable scraps to that side.  Gradually the worms will move from the finished compost, at which point you can remove it and dump it in your garden, your plants, or that patch of dirt outside where grass never seems to grow. For more information on composting, check out Worms Eat My Garbage by Mary Appelhof.

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A wind turbine and an oil rig walk into a bar. The oil rig turns to the turbine and says, “Dude, I think I’m running out. I don’t know what I’m going to do… do you have a plan?” The turbine looks at the oil rig and shrugs, “It’s kind of up in the air.” Many alternative energy critics wonder if America’s economy can truly adapt to the type of overhaul required to supplant oil and coal. The reality is that we have already done this at least three times in our short history. This country was founded as a wood burning economy. Wood gave way to coal, which in turn gave way to oil. Now, nearly a century after prohibition paved the way for Big Oil’s monopolistic infrastructure (a topic which really deserves its own column), we stand at the crossroads of a major cultural and economic shift. The question remains, which energy source is poised to take the reins?

In the late 1970’s Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the white house, only to have Ronald Reagan tear them down in his active campaign against alternative energy. Reagan cut the solar research budget proposed by Carter from $124 million in 1980 to $59 million in 1982, and by 1985 he had all but killed Carters dream. Reagan likely had Big Oil whispering in his ear (or his pockets), but there were legitimate economic factors that made this little coup possible. Oil prices plummeted in the early 80’s, drying up the demand for alternative energy. The cold war was doing a great job of diverting the public’s attention and frankly, thinking about the future wasn’t a very American thing to do. In 1985, solar power was just not the answer. Now, twenty years later, green is sexy, and republicans are anything but. The idea of “slapping some solar panels on the roof” seems a whole lot easier, and more sensible than it did 20 years ago. But while eye-opening realities have removed most of the roadblocks Carter ran into, solar still has a few skeletons in its closet. Solar technology has made great strides in efficiency over the past few decades, but it still takes a panel the size of an extra large Ray’s Famous Pizza box to power a single city streetlight. That means a whole lot of silicon would need to be produced in order to supply even the smallest percentage of our energy consumption. Furthermore, if we are doing all of this for the environment, it should be noted that the production of silicon isn’t the most earth friendly process; some experts suggest that it takes 3½ -5 years of solar production just to offset the environmental impact of creating solar panels.
The point of this article is hardly to knock solar power, though. Despite its relatively long financial and environmental payback, solar is still the most feasible solution on a residential scale. After all, it’s not like you can just “slap up a turbine” in your front yard. You can, however, harness wind power through a system based upon Renewable Energy Certificates, also known as Renewable Energy Credits, or simply RECs. The REC market is easily one of the most controversial, yet least comprehended, aspects of the green movement. It is complex, confusing, and sometimes frustrating, so much so that even industry experts can stumble through the challenge of explaining it in 50 words or less. Thankfully, I’ve got a few more than 50 words. If you head up to Vail, Aspen, or any number of ski resorts in the west, you may come across literature claiming that the entire mountain, and even the town, is powered by wind… but when you check the skyline there’s not a turbine in sight. These companies are purchasing wind power from a third party, which in turn pumps the equivalent amount of clean electricity onto the national grid on their behalf. Some companies spend millions of dollars a year to offset their consumption through clean energy, while relying on conventional energy for their own power requirements. This is where the naysayers jump up and cry 'foul.'

• “So you’re saying that I’m going to pay this many dollars on top of my energy bill, and I don’t get anything tangible out of it?” (Marketing, and a warm fuzzy feeling knowing you’re doing something good.)
• “How come I can’t get that wind energy pumped directly into my home/company/mountain?” (Because we can’t track individual electrons, and even if we could, sending 500 megawatts of wind energy from Texas to New York/Colorado/Florida is about as strategically sound as our current plan in Iraq.)
• “Who is to say that this wind energy wouldn’t be added without my REC purchase?”

This last question is a doozy, so I turn to my old trusted friend: The Numbers. The Numbers never lie (though if you’re in the Bush Administration you don’t need The Numbers to lie, you can just change them to fit your needs). When wind developers consider building a wind farm, they must inevitably consider which revenue streams will pay back the multi-million dollar capital investments that they are making.

Four such streams exist: Wind power sales, production tax credits (government rebates), tax write-offs on the equipment depreciation, and the sale of RECs. Because wind energy is more expensive to create than conventional energy, taking any one of these streams away makes the project financially unfeasible. Thus, if people, companies, nongovernmental organizations and state governments stop buying RECs, wind turbines stop going up. Take, for example, T. Boone Pickens, one of the largest and most successful oil tycoons in the history of Texas. The man has made fortune after fortune drilling oil, yet in April he announced that he’d be investing more than $10 billion dollars into the largest wind farm in the history of the planet. Keep in mind, this is the same man who, in 2005, said “I was in wind energy for a minute…. I hate it. And when I got to looking at those damn things I said, ‘I don't want to be a part of putting that on the horizon…’ We took a loss and got out of it and I'm glad I did.” One can only wonder, what changed Mr. T. Boone’s mind? A call to his press secretary yielded “no comment” when confronted with this information, though considering the amount of publicity he is getting over this, I’m surprised I even got her on the phone. Mr. Pickens is a businessman, and a mighty fine one at that. No doubt he is well aware that voluntary wind REC purchases have more than doubled since 2005, and the increased demand is driving up the price of RECs. Any corporate investment, especially one this large, has to consider the financial return on this investment versus the return on investing in conventional business operations. As such, one can only wonder, if RECs were not available, where would that $10 billion have been invested? We live in a market driven economy, and there is no doubt that the REC market is driving the wind market, making projects like Mr. Pickens’ feasible and profitable. But what exactly is driving the purchase of RECs? Why does a company like Whole Foods purchase over 500 million kilowatt hours worth or RECs each year? Whole Foods is a business, and like any other business, a purchase that large needs to be justified financially. Current market data suggests that 91% of consumers prefer purchasing goods from a company that is environmentally friendly. What’s more, consumers have shown that they are willing to pay as much as 30% more for products from such a company. So while on the surface it may seem like Whole Foods isn’t getting anything tangible for their purchase, those customers willing to support their efforts to drive wind development in this country are making it worth their while. Ultimately, business is business. For the past 100 years oil companies have made trillions of dollars destroying the environment, and now it seems that there are fortunes to be made protecting it. The wind market is booming, and it’s a beautiful thing. People will line their pockets, but I’m happy to pay an extra 30% on a dozen bagels if it helps motivate another oil tycoon to invest in a wind farm. In retrospect, Carter was a visionary, and I don’t think he was far off. He tried to set an example for a country that didn't want to listen. We certainly seem to be ready to listen now, though maybe it’s Dylan’s words we’re hearing from 1963 when he said “The answer, my friend, is blowin in the wind.”

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The phrase “Think globally, Act locally” has long been the rallying cry of youth for social change. Recently I’ve wondered whether its actual meaning has been lost in the shuffle, becoming as clichéd as a Vin Diesel movie. How many of those who proudly don this slogan on their bumper are merely “Thinking globally, Thinking about acting locally?” If you’ll lend me your eyes for a few minutes every other week, I’ll do what I can to help you bring about substantive change, on any scale you have the time or energy to commit to. Now, I don’t claim to be all knowing on all things environmental. Part of the beauty of the cleantech industry is that it is so new, and is changing so rapidly, that no such resource exists. Right now I’m reading Voluntary Carbon Markets, a book which not 12 months ago was considered the authoritative document on the subject, but is now simply considered out of date and out of print. In its stead is an industry blossoming in the face of a dwindling economy, populated by brilliant businessmen and women who jump at the opportunity to share their knowledge with even the most direct competition… because when you look just below the bottom line, you’ll find that we all have the same shareholder. _______________ When I arrived at Babson College last fall to begin my MBA I had a few cleantech business opportunities that I was exploring, but like nearly everyone else in the space, I was an industry rookie. I met Clinton White, the then Co-President of the Babson Energy and Environmental Club, who shared with me his vision of erecting a wind turbine smack dab in the middle of the athletic fields. Knowing full well that there exists no bureaucracy like that of an educational institution, I was pretty sure that he was delusional at best, but was happy to sign on for a challenge, and see what I could learn from the project. To be honest, on any given day throughout the last year, I probably would have estimated our chance of success at around 17%, right up through the moment those blades started spinning this past Earth Day, when I was quite certain it was some sort of heat induced optical illusion. I mean seriously, how could three pesky MBA students convince the understandably skeptical administration at a Business oriented school to erect a 35 foot structure which, due to marginal wind conditions, may not even pay for itself over the 25 year life of the project? _______________ For generations, colleges and universities have been hotbeds for social change, representing the most feasible opportunity for young people to act locally. As an undergrad I didn’t realize the power of student organizations until my senior year, and even then I didn’t see much value beyond the surfing and culinary clubs. Six years later, I find myself with the opportunity to pass on what I know to those who care to hear, just as Clinton and so many others have done for me. And what I know is this:

• The electricity in your dorm or office isn’t really free, so turn off your lights, computers, and video game consoles when you're done using them.
• Buy a coffee mug and a Nalgene, and then bet the “over” on the number of coffee cups and plastic bottles you don’t throw in a landfill this year.
• Buy a cloth shopping bag and never have to answer “paper or plastic” again.
• Pop an empty two liter bottle into the toilet tank and save half a gallon of water with every flush; it doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to suggest that once this planet finishes fighting over oil, the next great war will be over water.
• Insulate your windows, close your curtains at night and open them during the day (vice versa in the summer). Bundle up a bit if it’s not too cold.
• Quit kicking cigarette butts in the street (or just quit cigarettes).
• Wash your clothes in cold water, dry them on a clothesline if it’s nice out.
• Carpool, or better yet, get yourself a nice bike (this summer I’m on pace to pedal more miles than I drive).
• Take the bus, train, or your god given feet.
• Sell your SUV, spit on a Hummer. Then, make use of the resources around you.

The Babson Energy and Environmental Club is the largest, most active student group on campus. We operate as a business, with a mission statement and an executive board chock full of talented MBA’s looking to really make a difference. Last year we raised over $25,000, held environmental business information sessions, venture capital forums, and put on the largest student run cleantech conference in the Northeast. While the wind turbine was easily our most visible and recognizable success, those 5,500 kWh of clean energy produced each year represent only a small piece of an ongoing environmental overhaul. In reality, the Babson Wind Turbine is not the environmental solution for this particular university. Unfavorable wind conditions yield an installation operating at a 20% capacity (put in perspective, the best wind conditions usually yield about 55% capacity), and overly strict zoning laws in Wellesley, MA restricted us to a 35 foot tower. But as Batman would undoubtedly agree, as a symbol, the Turbine could be so much more. We contended that if the turbine’s presence could inspire the average student to reduce his or her consumption by a meager 1%, the actual net present value of the project would be well over $850,000. And with that, we were rolling. In the end, even the three pesky students who sat in that conference room last December, pitching a business opportunity hinging on ancillary benefits, could not have predicted the widespread impact of our work. When the Sunday Boston Globe exposed the value and potential of our project, the publicity sent shockwaves through the campus. The groundbreaking ceremony brought a State Representative and a State Senator, who in turn brought a Senatorial Certificate of Environmental Achievement. More publicity, more opportunities, and more traction for the dozens of other sustainability projects we’ll be pushing across desks this fall. And to date, it’s been a career driver for three opportunistic MBA students. So if you’re sitting in your dorm room in any of the thousand schools out there with much better wind and/or solar resources than that of Wellesley, wondering how to enact substantive change, head down to the facilities management office. Those folks will be your biggest allies, and will undoubtedly be stoked on the opportunity to reduce their energy bills. Explain to them that while the average homeowner evaluates such investments on a 5 to 15 year payback period, universities need to be planning for the next century. Look into LEED certification, power purchase agreements, or even renewable energy credits. Write a proposal, and run it by everyone who will listen, especially professors. Touch base with Net Impact. Truly harness the power of the people. Campus level opportunities exist whether you’re a current student, recent graduate, faculty member or longtime alum. It won’t always be easy, it won’t always be fun, and it will definitely take up more of your time than you anticipate. It will however, be a rewarding, inspiring experience; one that will allow you to find real world application for the skills you’re learning (or learned) in class.

So go on… buy a coffee mug, build a turbine.

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