2011 October 09

Human Waste Dumped into Oceans Harms Coral, New Study Reveals

Dead coral, Elbow Reef, Key Largo, Florida. Credit: HalBrindley.com Elkhorn coral is endangered. And it's being threatened by us, as in humans, and what we flush down the toilet. A recent study published in the journal PLoS One says that human sewage is largely responsible for a disease which is killing off elkhorn coral in Florida. It's called white pox disease, and at least one scientist argues that the problem goes far beyond the Sunshine State, and is likely contributing to coral decline worldwide. ...Read the full story on TreeHugger

‘Fitness Deserts’ a Threat to Health in Many Cities

Jogging in Washington, DC. Photo: Daquella Manera / Creative Commons. With its steep hills, narrow (if not nonexistent) sidewalks, scanty parks, air pollution, and aggressive, unpredictable drivers, Istanbul has admittedly been an unlikely place for me to take up...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Convincing asset owners to invest in Impact Investing.

What is the best way to get asset owners (HNW, Pension Funds, Family Offices) to start investing in projects and funds that provide social, environmental, and financial returns.

How to convince Asset Owners (HNW, Family Offices, Pension Funds) about ESG and Impact Investing.

Did you ever notice that all the studies and anecdotal evidence shows that HNW are actually interested in ESG and Impact Investing? I get constant requests from asset owners  for interesting investment opportunities that provide a financial, social and environmental added value. However, when you go through the so called “gate keepers” (private banks, wealth advisors, wealth managers), nothing happens.
You will hear that “risk management can’t approve”. “We need to invest in established, long term track record, blah, blah”. So, I say, “Oh. You mean European Sovereign Debt, or Stocks which haven’t performed in 10 years, or better yet asset managers, like Madoff ”

How can you get through to asset owners?

I have found, that after 13 years of trying,  the most effective is to reach out directly and indirectly, and by letting them experience the ESG and Impact Investment community, at TBLI CONFERENCE EUROPE or ASIA. By allowing them to come, learn and interact with all these financial professionals through educational outreach and actually meet investors, who are putting large sums to work in ESG and Impact Investing, the rest falls into place.

That is why we allow 50 asset owners to come for free. If you are an asset owner and want to learn about ESG and Impact Investing, contact esther@tbli.org

The business of cooling the planet

The risk of disruptive climate change grows every day. John Holdren, the White House science advisor, said last year that we have three options: Mitigate, adapt, suffer. If we don’t mitigate (meaning reduce emissions), we’ll have to adapt (move to new places, develop new crops, build sea walls). If we do neither, we’ll suffer. But, as regular readers of this blog know, there’s a fourth option–geoengineering.

Geoengineering is term used to describe planetary-scale technologies that are designed to counteract the climate effects of past greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere. I’ve been fascinated with geoengineering for about two years, and this week FORTUNE will publish my story, The Business of Cooling the Planet, about three startup companies that want to save the planet by capturing carbon dioxide from the air.  This topic is so important that I’m planning to expand the story into a short e-book in the next couple of months.

The FORTUNE story begins by describing how Microsoft founder Bill Gates became an expert on climate and energy:

One of the cool things about being Bill gates is that if you are curious about something, you can find smart people who will teach you whatever it is that you want to know. About five years ago Gates decided that he wanted to learn about climate change, so he arranged for two of the world’s leading climate scientists, David Keith of the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, and Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution, to organize a series of seminars. Since then, Keith and Caldeira have recruited scientists, energy experts, economists, and policy wonks to deliver about a dozen detailed presentations to Gates. He prepares by doing hundreds of pages of reading, some quite technical; the ensuing discussions, which last three or four hours, can be intense. “Bill has the intellectual curiosity of a very bright graduate student,” Caldeira says, “but a graduate student whose time you are not supposed to waste.”

This is no academic exercise. Gates has been convinced that the risk of global warming is worse than most people think. He can see that the world’s governments have failed to curb the emissions caused by burning coal, oil, and natural gas. In June 2010 he put together a coalition of business leaders, including GE’s Jeff Immelt, to urge Congress to invest more in clean-energy research, but that’s not happening. So the Microsoft billionaire and philanthropist has stepped into the breach to become the world’s leading funder of research into geoengineering— deliberate, large-scale interventions in the earth’s climate system intended to prevent climate change and its repercussions.

Since 2007, Gates has given about $4.6 million of his money to Caldeira and Keith for geoengineering research. Intellectual Ventures, a private company funded in part by Gates, has explored such technologies as building an 18-mile-long hose, tethered by balloons, that would spray tiny particles into the stratosphere to block the sun’s rays. Gates has even attached his name to a patent application for ocean-churning technology designed to sap the strength of hurricanes, which appear to be getting fiercer because of global warming.

The story goes on focus on three startup companies that are working on

A straightforward, albeit audacious, way to cool an overheating planet: Build many thousands of big machines to remove carbon dioxide from the air.

The companies are Carbon Engineering (in which Gates is an investor), Global Thermostat and Kilimanjaro Energy. They are all a long way from making any money from carbon dioxide removal, and indeed there are many skeptics who say the costs of pulling CO2 from the air are so high that it will never make business sense.

Still, the work these companies are doing is important for three reasons, all of which underscore the way carbon dioxide removal (CDR) differs from solar radiation management, the better-known geoengineering technology:

First, these companies are asking us to think about CO2 in a new way, not as a dangerous waste product or pollutant, but as a resource that can be captured, recycled and made into something new – potentially, carbon free fuels.

Second, unlike some of the quicker, cheaper and easier forms of geoengineering (like shooting tiny particles into the stratosphere to block the sun), carbon dioxide removal is relatively low-risk. Yes, there are real issues about what to do with the CO2 once it’s captured from the air, but those should be manageable.

Third, while solar radiation management attempts to deal with the fact of climate change, i.e., a warming planet, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) goes right at the cause, by reversing the rising atmospheric concentrations of CO2. It’s the closest thing we have to a time machine.

None of this is to suggest that dealing with the climate crisis will be easy. It won’t be, particularly given the dismal state of climate politics in the U.S. But that’s another reason to hope that one or more of these startups find success.

You can read the rest of the FORTUNE story here.

Bill McKibben Links Climate Change to Corruption in Stirring Occupy Wall Street Speech (Video)

The climate activism community is now firmly in the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) fight. 350.org joined in the tens of thousands on the streets of New York last week; and now environmental activist Bill McKibben has starkly laid out the links between climate change, the corporations blocking climate action, and the rank effect of the oil industry corrupting the Read the full story on TreeHugger

New York Times Blows Lid Off State Department’s Outsourcing of Keystone XL Environmental Review

photo via tarsandsaction.org The New York Time's Elisabeth Rosenthal and Dan Frosch today gave a lot of ink in the "Paper of Record" to the State Department's decision to hire Cardno Entrix, an environmental contractor based in Houston, to write a portion of its environmental impact statement (EIS) for the permit of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. State often hires contractors for this sort of work. The problem here is that Cardno Entrix also works for TransCanada, the Canadian company that is...Read the full story on TreeHugger