Green Options

The Sears Tower loomed large during my childhood in the Chicago suburbs. I remember when it opened in 1973. We took a special trip downtown to see it. According to my aesthetics as a seven year old, it wasn’t very elegant and I preferred the John Hancock Tower with its swanky restaurant on the 95th floor and proximity to Marshall Fields. Then the company my dad worked for was bought by Coldwell Banker, a subsidiary of Sears at the time, and his office was moved to the Tower. I spent some quality daddy-daughter time there, and one memorable summer got paid the incredibly generous sum of $8 an hour to take the train to the city every day, do some filing and hang out downtown.

But the Tower, in my mind, never had much to distinguish it other than a great view from the 103rd floor, its height of 110 stories and the convenience of the train station. But now everything is changing.

By the end of the summer, it will no longer be the Sears Tower. It will be called the Willis Tower, named for the global insurance broker. But more importantly, the building will undergo a $350 million efficiency and renewable energy retrofit that will reduce the base building electricity use by up to 80 percent - 68 million kilowatt hours annually or 150,000 barrels of oil every year. The retrofit will also create more than 3,600 jobs in the Chicago area.

An environmentalist praising an American car maker and a NASCAR driver in the same post? Fasten your seatbelts!
On Monday, a team of drivers, including hypermiler Wayne Gerdes and NASCAR driver Carl Edwards successfully completed the 1000 mile challenge, taking a 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid 1005 miles on less than a single tank of gas. (Full disclosure time, my company, BLU MOON Group, does some work with Carl Edwards, but we weren’t involved in this event.) The 1000 mile challenge was also a fundraising event for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. Here’s the best part, though; they made it over 1000 miles with almost 1/3 tank of gas remaining and achieved more than 80 miles per gallon from the same Fusion Hybrid that you or I can buy. Pretty cool, right?

Dr. Woodrow Clark is a co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Prize, along with former Vice President Al Gore, for his work as a co-author and co-editor of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Report. He was also the first Research Director for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, establishing the economic and technical basis for renewable energy technologies to be commercialized in developing nations.

He currently manages Clark Strategic Partners and consults with the Los Angeles Community College District helping their nine college campuses become energy independent and carbon neutral. I caught up with Dr. Clark to talk about renewable energy, energy policy, bicycle lanes and why it all matters.

Leslie Berliant: How did you become involved in co-authoring the report from the UN IPCC that ultimately made you a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize?

Woody Clark At the time, I was at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. At that time, it was part of the UC (University of California) system and funded by the US Department of Energy. The lb itself was named after Ernest Lawrence, the Nobel prize winner in Physics. For 50 years after World War II, it was all part of the UC system. That’s no longer the case, which is a shame. Anyway, I became aware of the work the UN was starting to do in this area and while I was full time at Lawrence Livermore labs, I asked if I could participate in the panels. They said I had to do it on my own time and at my own expense so I did. I found some money and paid for my travel and took time off from work because I thought it was an important topic to pursue. I was a participant in the panels throughout the 90’s. As a result, I was asked to be the first research director for one of the areas of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change; I was to look at environmentally sound technologies like solar, wind, and others and see how they could be transferred from developed countries to developing countries. I had 6 co-authors covering things like wind from Denmark and solar from Japan. It was a landmark study. My involvement with the IPCC went on for about 4 or 5 years but after a while I changed jobs and went to work in Denmark as a visiting professor and wasn’t able to participate anymore. Another interesting twist is that I was the co-author on the chapter on economic and finance and the co-editor on the chapter on legal and contract agreements. Those are two areas that I’m very much involved in today. In fact, it’s what I do professionally with the colleges.

This weekend, I went to a gathering of 50 people interested in advocating for clean energy in the United States. I rode my bike there. At least a dozen people commented on what a “good girl” I was for doing so.
We poured ourselves coffee and tea into paper cups. We ate our potluck lunch on paper plates with plastic forks. We grabbed our bottles of water. We wiped our mouths with paper napkins and we grabbed our packets of printed materials to talk about how we could help push the federal government into making clean energy a reality, starting with identifying ‘green’ businesses to be our allies in this campaign.

Courtesy of  Scientific American and Environmental Health News, another reason to despise plastic. According to an article by Matthew Cimitile, researchers believe that airborne pollution from plastics manufacturing may change the DNA of cattle.
It all started when ranchers living 4 miles downwind from the Formosa Plastics facilities in Point Comfort, Texas noticed that their steers were losing weight, their cows were miscarrying and having stillborn calves and some of the calves were being born with abnormalities like missing limbs:
Tests have revealed that herds as far as six miles downwind of the factories have more DNA disturbances than other herds not downwind, according to scientists at Texas A & M University. The changes in chromosome structure and other genetic damage can increase the animal’s risk of cancer and reproductive damage

Next Wednesday night, March 25th, tune into HBO2’s premiere of the documentary They Killed Sister Dorothy at 8 pm if you want to begin to understand the violence and injustice that surrounds the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. If you aren’t going to be home, then set your Tivo.
I was fortunate enough to see Daniel Junge’s film last month at the City of the Angels Film Festival in Los Angeles. The documentary follows the aftermath of the murder of 73 year-old Sister Dorothy Stang, known as the Angel of the Amazon, a Catholic nun and rainforest activist shot in the back while trying to empower local communities to set up sustainable farms while fighting illegal logging and land grabs.

I am obsessed with farms and farmers markets. People that read my work probably know that by now. Did I mention that I sometimes go to three different farmers markets in a single week? One of the things I love is that in addition to fruits and veggies, my local farmers markets have vendors selling milk and cheese, whole chickens, eggs of various types and sizes, pork and beef. I don’t eat most of that stuff, but I love that it is there and that it comes from local farms.
Soon, however, there may not be meat at farmers markets, or meat raised by small farmers, at all. That’s because of the roll out of the National Animal ID System (NAIS), requiring farmers to attach radio frequency identification ear tags on cattle, dairy cows, pigs and chickens.

If you have never heard of the Department of Energy’s Building America initiative, started in the 1990’s, start paying attention. With tax incentives for home energy efficiency and the addition of the new Builders Challenge initiative, started in January of 2008 this program is likely to become increasingly popular.
Building America works with research teams that include builders, manufacturers and technical experts to develop technologies and strategies that lead to improved home energy efficiency. They also created the Builders Challenge; builders that agree to join the Builders Challenge commit to constructing homes that rate 70 or better on the EnergySmart Home Scale (E-Scale).

In honor of International Women’s Day on March 8th, a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women, the World Rainforest Movement (WRM) and Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) have released three new case studies and a video on the impacts of monoculture tree plantations on women in Nigeria, Papua New Guinea and Brazil.
These tree plantations provide rubber for car and bus tires, palm oil for processed foods and pulp for toilet paper - all items being used in the west. They are also destroying local communities according to WRM and FoEI.

In the case of Nigeria, in 2007, the French tire maker Michelin came in to the Iguóbazuwa Forest Reserve, a biologically diverse region supplying food for around 20,000 people. Michelin bulldozed the forest and local farm lands to convert them into rubber plantations. Women living there lost their subsistence farms and the local forest which provided medicinal herbs and plants.

According to research by consulting firm A.T. Kearny, compiled in their “Green” Winners Report, “companies committed to corporate sustainability practices are achieving above average performance in the financial markets during this slowdown.” The key is that the commitment to sustainability be authentic.
In cases where it is integrated into a company to deal with human and natural resources in a sustainable manner and sell products that have low environmental impact, those companies are outperforming their industry piers in the financial markets by as much as 15%. According to the report, “in 16 of the 18 industries examined, companies recognized as sustainability-focused outperformed their industry peers over both a three and six-month period, and were well protected from value erosion.” Not insignificant in these difficult economic times.