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A year ago I traveled to Detroit to moderate a discussion between Mark Tercek, the head of the Nature Conservancy (TNC)—one of the biggest green groups in the U.S.—and Andrew Liveris, the CEO of Dow Chemical. They were in town to talk about an innovative collaboration that would help TNC develop strategies that would help [...]
AL GORE and DAVID BLOOD, writing in the Wall Street Journal. Gore and Blood—who are the chairman and managing partner of Generation Investment Management respectively—argue that capitalism needs to focus on the long-term, rather than on quarterly returns. They cite a recent Harvard Business School study (PDF) that tracked the performance of 180 companies over 18 years, and [...]
As an environment writer, I’m constantly sent pitches highlighting companies that are going green, getting more efficient, shrinking their carbon footprint—and few industries talk a bigger game than the airlines. Companies like American Airlines hype their new, more fuel-efficient fleets, while other corporations like to talk about their work with experimental biofuels. Just a couple [...]
It’s not hard to imagine the damage weird weather inflicts on our planet. Hurricane Katrina, for example, obliterated coastal communities, wiped out businesses and left hundreds of dead bodies in its wake. Quantifying the cost of such a one-off (we hope) event is pretty easy too: Katrina left us with a bill of $81 billion, [...]
I have a piece in today’s magazine about General Electric’s big solar bet. The multinational behemoth—which has already built a $6 billion-plus wind turbine business—is now looking to move into solar manufacturing as well. That might be bad news for competitors like First Solar, but it’s good news for those who want to see solar [...]
Consumerism—perhaps more than any other factor—has driven the growth of green ideas and policies over the past decade. (Which, if you think about it, is a little ironic, but never mind that for now.) Whether it’s the near-vertical growth of the organic food movement, the spread of BPA-free bottles and other products for the concerned [...]
Better hope you’ve got a little extra closet space. Sometime today, American industry will manufacture or import 250 lbs. of chemicals just for you. There will be another 250 lbs. tomorrow and another the day after that — every day, in fact, throughout the year. That’s a pretty big mountain of chemistry, but if we’re [...]
In this week’s Going Green column, I have a piece on Ray Anderson, the founder of the modular carpet manufacturer Interface and quite possibly the greenest CEO in America. Some of that reputation stems from what Anderson has done with Interface, setting the company on a path to total sustainability—meaning zero waste—by 2020. But to [...]
On this Monday Pulitzer afternoon (no Breaking News award? What gives?), I wanted to turn your attention to an interesting piece in the Huffington Post from Lynn Jurich, the president and co-founder of SunRun, a major home solar-energy installer. Jurich notes that at the very time when a sluggish economy, high unemployment and back-breaking gas [...]
Want to save the Earth? Easy, just buy a couple of ice trays. To the long list of human inventions that are wrecking global climate—the internal combustion engine, the industrial era factory—add the automatic ice maker. Climate modelers have long known that households are far bigger contributors to global warming than most laypeople realize. For [...]
