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OAKLAND, Calif. -- Despite being a centerpiece of celebrations the world over, fireworks displays often release toxic chemicals into the environment; researchers are developing a new generation of fireworks that shine as bright but leave less of an impact.
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ELMSFORD, N.Y. -- Coca Cola signed a 10-year contract with UTC Power that will bring two fuel cells to a southern New York bottling plant, where they will produce enough heat and energy to satisfy nearly a third of the facility's needs. The state of New York also provided $2 million for the project.
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GENEVA, -- Efforts by the world's leading cement companies knocked down carbon dioxide emissions from the industry’s manufacturing process by 35 percent even while production climbed by 53 percent, according to a new report by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development’s Cement Sustainability Initiative.
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What About the Skeptics?
My workplace neighbor is a skeptic. One of my close work colleagues from a past job is a skeptic. They are both good people who consider themselves well read, well informed and well intentioned -- just as I consider myself to be! But we disagree.
I know all these particular folks well, so they were willing to share their views. But skeptics can be reticent to tell the CSR guy their position, and I suspect these two colleagues who will share their views are but a subset of plenty of others who feel that their views on this topic will be minimized and so won't share them. Employees are a critical stakeholder group and we cannot afford to leave large numbers of them behind.
Most of the readers of GreenBiz likely feel passionate about avoiding the potentially catastrophic impact of climate change. There is an excitement that the new administration gets it too and so things are going to change now. Companies are on board and the mainstream media affirms our views too. But in our resulting enthusiasm we run the risk of minimizing -- and so not addressing -- the views of those with whom we disagree. Despite comments I hear to the contrary, I am confident that most skeptics are well intentioned people who have simply come to different conclusions.
This past Friday I was at the holiday gala lunch of the British-American Business Association. I chair the energy and environment committee of the association. I sat next to the CEO of a well-known and respected medium-sized corporation. He shared with me that he is a skeptic. When I reflect on my view that the corporate world gets it too, I realize that I tend to see the same company names time and again. There are plenty of companies on board, but plenty not.
My conclusion? It will come back to haunt us if we take the position that the skeptics are an insignificant, ill-informed bunch and it’s time to move on. From a purely parochial perspective, skeptics will at best pay only lip service to what we need them to do in their personal and work lives to address climate change. We do need to move ahead and take action, but we owe it to them as stakeholders to continue to hear out their positions considerately, to provide to them the evidence we find so compelling, and to consider and respond appropriately to the contrary evidence they find so compelling.
Kevin Moss has responsibility for implementation of BT's Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategy for BT in North America and maintains a blog at www.mosske.blogspot.com
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Thanks for raising the issue!
I am a skeptic who is also a big proponent of sustainable design and construction. I tend to be in the camp that feels that even if we're wrong about climate change, it just makes sense to reduce our impact on the environment anyway.
My main concern is the intrinsic levels of error that come with any model: economic, environmental, or otherwise. If you asked a group of leading economists even as little as six months ago about where we would be today I guarantee they would not have predicted the scale and magnitude of our current recession. I imagine if we look at all of the climate models 20 years from now they will be proven similarly innaccurate, hopefully in a way that is
Ultimately all climate models are based on assumptions. I feel it is impossible to for us to really understand how the world will react tomorrow, the next week, or twenty years from now. For a good example of all of the ways we've gotten it wrong over the years I highly recommend Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, a fascinating read about how as a general rule, our predictions as a society about the way things work are typically incorrect.
I don't mean to belittle the efforts of climate scientists and other environmentalists working to better understand where we live. Most reports I've read clearly state the uncertainty inherent in the models, though media reports almost always downplay (or outright omit) their importance in favor of highlighting a more interesting headline.
At the end of the day I'm more scared about the climate scientist being right than them being wrong, and for that reason I'll support any reasonable project aimed at lessening our carbon footprint. Moving to nuclear energy from coal on what is largely a CO2 argument doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me given the relative expense, danger, and other environmental issues raised with nuclear generation. Wind power, solar, hydro, and geothermal however seem like excellent long term solutions we should be advocating for strongly, regardless of ones thoughts on global warming.
Though we are consuming enormous amounts of energy, materials, and land as a society, the earth is resilient in ways that are impossible to predict ("unknown unknowns" in the parlance of Donald's Rumsfeld). I will forever consider myself (and hopefully act in a manner consistent with being) a strong environmentalist, for reasons wholly unrelated to climate change. I fear climate change as well, but I think it will be nearly impossible for me to believe in it until I see the effects firsthand. As by then it may be too late, I hope that day never comes.
Joel McKellar
Real Life LEED
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