A new way to treat wood has trees back in the limelight: a hardwood’s reliability that even a rain forest mahogany tree can love.

The above picture is of the world’s first heavy traffic road bridge made from Accoya® wood. The bridge, located in Sneek in the Netherlands, is “the first wooden bridge in the world that can support the heaviest load class of 60 tons”.  At this week’s Wall Street Green Trading Summit, a panel on forestation introduced a new way of thinking about how to deal with destruction of the rain forest.

>> More from the recent Wall Street Green Trading Summit:   Opening, Carbon Markets, Weird Investments and Solar Panels for All.

I think we can all agree that planting trees is a good way to go environmentally green (they capture carbon like crazy), but lets take a look at that other green for a moment: the green of cash.  Forestation can turn a profit quickly, given that it is one of the few industries in the United States that we know for sure will be cross marketable as a carbon offset industry. 

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Even for a group focused on Investing First and Green Second, this is getting a little silly.

The longer I am here at the Wall Street Green Trading Summit, the less this feels like anything to do with environmentalism.  At some point, when does off-setting stop being feasible, and when does carbon reduction become the name of the game?

>> More Wall Street Green Trading Summit:   Opening, Carbon Markets, Solar Panels and the Electric Grid

This was driven home to me by a presentation on the investment opportunities presented by species banks.  Now, I didn’t even know what a species bank was until today, but apparently you can purchase an offset credit to get around the fact that your company is destroying the natural habitat of an endangered species.  And, there is an entire market based around this principle.

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We’re coming at you no-longer-quite-live at New York’s very own Wall Street Green Trading Summit.

The summit is over for today, but I wanted to throw some concluding thoughts out after an afternoon spent discussing good business models for producing alternative energy and for overhauling our current electrical grid.

>> More Wall Street Green Trading Summit:   Opening, Carbon Markets, Weird Investments.

Two presentations stuck out to me from the afternoon, Tioga Energy and Acorn (no, not that ACORN) Energy.  Without turning this into too much of a publicity-fest for either company, here’s what they were about.

Solar Panels for All

Tioga has gotten pretty good at a business model that I’ve actually heard about in a few different places: effectively, they lease people’s roof space and put solar panels up on homes and businesses.  Then, they sell the energy to the people in the home at a fixed rate (below market value for the customer) that goes up slowly over a 20 year period.  There are options for the owner of the property to purchase the solar panels if they would like to down the line, but until they do Tioga maintains everything for them. This means that the company soaks the initial start-up costs for people: often that prohibitive thing reinventing a small business or a home-owner from taking a plunge.

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We’re coming at you live with more special Red, Green, and Blue coverage from New York’s very own Wall Street Green Trading Summit.

It’s Lunchtime now at the WSGTS, and I just emerged from another dizzying bout of acronyms to find myself totally shocked by how little I know about big market investing. Fortunately, I stumbled on Open Carbon World, an open source project on carbon footprints that is here at the conference.  They have accumulated the following glossary of terms, acronyms and etc. to help novices like me navigate these crazy fast talking presentations.  If I drop one or two over the next few days, please forgive the frazzled brain, and give them a look up!  

>> More Wall Street Green Trading Summit:  The Species Bank?, Carbon Markets, Solar Panels and the Electric Grid

OCW is presenting tomorrow, so I’ll reserve final judgment ’til then, but expect a post on some sweet open source ideas having to do with footprints and offsets.

OCW is presenting tomorrow, so I’ll reserve final judgment ’til then, but expect a post on some sweet open source ideas having to do with footprints and offsets.

OK, so Carbon Trading, huh?

The murky mysteries of the market continue to elude me.  The second session today was all about the carbon offset market: where the money is, where the investment opportunities are and will be, and who is making the rules about what a carbon offset even means.

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We’re coming at you live with special Red, Green, and Blue coverage from New York’s very own Wall Street Green Trading Summit.

The WSGTS claims to be the longest running and most comprehensive environmental market event in the industry (and we have no reason to doubt them!)

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According to the event’s official webpage, “Live Earth will use the global reach of music to engage people on a mass scale to combat our climate crisis.”

You can join the rest of the planet in celebrating the steps we have taken and the steps we must take to reverse climate change. Live Earth concerts will be broadcast around the world by television, radio, and the Internet. You can be a part of it all at one of over 6,000 locations worldwide that have agreed to host Live Earth parties to view the concerts. To find a party near you through the Live Earth network, go to www.joinliveearth.org/page/event/search_simple. You can also join parties through MoveOn.org.

References:

Live Earth Concert

Join Live Earth from your city

Live Earth 7-Point Pledge

Carbon Footprint… Species Footprint?

A Carbon offset is a nebulous thing, but it does have measurements: tons of C02, years you can produce.  This raises some questions about how one can verify the veracity of a bank.  How long does the new place have to be “guaranteed safe” before the permanent destruction of a previous habitat is deemed acceptable?  What happens if a species that was on the endangered list makes a come back?  Does that mean your offset credit is now worthless?  Man, I hope Wall Street has some idea of how to defray the risks inherent in biology.

Unlike with carbon, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of voluntary market for these credits.  People who want to conserve manage to find some way to, well, conserve.  They find ways to make projects that don’t involve the destruction of habitats and species.   This means that this entire market is all based on government regulations and the things that the feds deem worthy of protection.  I guess that, in our capitalist driven society, placing a monetary value on something seems to be the only way to move from an adversarial debate between business and environmentalism.  After all, as Douglas Adams said: “You’ve got to build bypasses”.

Image: via Dou, flickr.com creative commons license