5,000 Days

Over the past year or so, I've taken to thinking more about scale and speed — how we need to vastly accelerate our efforts to create a greener economy beyond what we're currently doing. At the rate at which we are gradually improving energy and water efficiency, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and addressing biodiversity, deforestation, the loss of fisheries, and the human condition for the world's poorest billion or two — well, we're never going to get there. Indeed, for some of these issues, the indicators of progress are headed in the wrong direction.

Perhaps it's my advancing years, or my congenital impatience, or my reading of the tea leaves, or all three, but I find myself in a bigger hurry than ever to figure things out.

And one day on stage last fall, I just blurted it out: "We've got about 5,000 days to figure things out," I proclaimed. It turned out to be a powerful sentiment, based on the comments and subsequent calls and emails I received.

Five thousand days — 13 years and change. If you have a child in kindergarten today, in 5,000 days she'll be a freshman in college. Time flies.

Where did that number come from? I'll be the first to admit that it is not based on scientific analysis. Rather, it's a mix of what I've been hearing and what I've been feeling — an amalgam of information and instinct. (At Compostmodern, a one-day conference in in February that I emceed, I began the event with the 5,000-day reference. Later, during audience Q&A, I was asked how I arrived at that number. I flippantly responded, "I made it up," then went on to explain the rationale. Of course, only the first four words of my response became the story, as reported by Treehugger. You can watch some of it here.)

But 5,000 days is not without foundation. For example, in 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, comprised of more than 2,000 scientists from around the world, announced that we have about 10 years left to enact policies that will avert climate catastrophe. Similarly, Al Gore, in An Inconvenient Truth, said that the world has 10 years or less to turn things around. Last year, IPCC's Nobel Peace Prize-winning chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, went further, saying only seven years remained to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at a level widely considered safe. In 2007, the World Wide Fund for Nature warned governments that they have five years — until 2012 — to "plant the seeds of change" and make positive moves to limit carbon emissions.

A little over a week ago, British Prince Charles told an audience in Rio de Janeiro, "The best projections tell us that we have less than 100 months to alter our behavior before we risk catastrophic climate change." That's a tad over eight years — about 3,000 days.

In comparison, 5,000 days may be optimistic.

Pondering the science behind such time frames was befuddling until Saul Griffith came along. Griffith, for the uninitiated, is an inventor, best known for his inexpensive technique for making prescription eyeglasses that has become one of the leading solutions for correcting vision in developing nations. His latest company, Makani Power, aims to create high-altitude wind turbines tethered like kites. His resume includes a PhD from MIT's Media Lab, a fistful of fellowships, and several honors and awards, including a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. This may be one case where that moniker isn't hyperbole.

I met Griffith at Compostmodern, where he gave a rapid-fire, mathematical formula-laden yet entertaining presentation about the need for radical new design thinking in the age of climate change. He uses his own life to underscore the need for designers and others to use metrics in order to effect change. He shows how he's methodically calculated the carbon impact of everything he buys and does, right down to his socks and surfing. At one point in his quirky presentation, he set out to "prove" my 5,000-day thesis, offering some scientific equations he says he "knocked out" in the relatively few minutes since my opening remarks. Suddenly, I felt vindicated.

Recently, I asked Griffith to revisit that explanation, which he did in a detailed email. I'll do my best to excerpt and summarize it here.

Griffith began by explaining that typical climate goals are expressed as a percentage of current emissions — such as an "80 percent reduction by 2050, using 1990 emissions as a baseline." That's only marginally helpful, he says, because it leaves out two key data points: the target level of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration at which you hope to stabilize things; and how much power you plan to derive from non-carbon sources — renewables, such as solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass.

Currently, he points out, we're at 387 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 in the atmosphere. Let's assume that we want to try to stabilize things at 450 ppm — "the point of no return" at which some scientists believe we reach catastrophic climate change. Of course, a growing chorus of climate scientists argue that 450 ppm is too high to avoid climate change's worst impacts, that the target number should be 400 ppm or even 350 ppm.

Given the amount of energy the world now uses each year — about 10 terrawatt-years, or 10 trillion watts per year — it would take us about 40 years until we reached the 450 ppm concentration, given that based on current energy usage patterns, CO2 concentrations are growing by 2 ppm a year. (That assumes that energy use never increased over current levels, an unlikely scenario, given steadily rising global energy consumption.)

But Griffith asks us to assume that humans take the following bold, ambitious actions in the relatively near future:

• replace the world's fleet of around 1 billion cars with small, light electric vehicles;
• create 5 terrawatts (TW) of new solar generating capacity;
• create 2 TW of new geothermal capacity;
• create 3 TW of wind capacity; and
• build 250 million new energy-efficient "green homes."

In the process, we'd replace the current 10 terrawatt-years of fossil fuel energy with renewables. However, building all that solar, geothermal, and wind capacity will require mining, smelting, transporting, manufacturing, and other industrial activities that themselves produce greenhouse gases. So, says Griffith, "At least for a while, we'll be using coal, oil, and natural gas to create the new solar cells, electric cars, wind turbines, nuclear power plants, green homes, and mass transit solutions, until we can make those machines with clean power from these resources."

Griffith calculates that building the billion cars would add 0.5 ppm of CO2 to the atmosphere, and that creating the solar generating capacity would add 6 ppm. Building and installing the wind power and geothermal capacity would each add another 0.5 ppm, while constructing the green homes would contribute 9 ppm. That's 16 ppm on top of the current 387, plus the normal 2 ppm annual growth. "That would take us to 415 ppm from where we are today," says Griffith. At that point, we'd have only 250 terrawatt-years — 25 years of generating 10 TW of fossil fuel energy per year — before we reached the 450 ppm point.

If I did the math correctly, this assumes that we achieved all of Griffith's energy, vehicle, and building goals over the next six years or so. Suffice to say, that's not likely.

So, says Griffith:

Five thousand days is 13.6 years. If we do nothing for 13.6 years, and then we make the decisions above, we only get 7 years of our current energy consumption before we don't get any energy to run humanity. Every [unit of energy] after that has to be put towards the new infrastructure.

He concludes: "Even 5,000 days seems way too many."

Such calculations aside — whether 5,000 or 3,000 or even 10,000 days is the right number — isn't really the point. The point is that time is short, and getting shorter. In that light, where's the urgency? Where's the audaciously big thinking? Where's the scale?

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Calculating the Gross National Trash

More than 15 years ago, I received some data that changed the way I looked at trash. It came in the form of an obscure presentation by a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency official to a September 1992 teleconference hosted by the Center for Industrial Services at the University of Tennessee.

The document was an eye-opener. According to Jim Lounsbury, then in the EPA's Office of Solid Waste, the pile of trash that had become the focus of public concern — the so-called "landfill crisis" — municipal solid waste, or MSW, comprised only a tiny piece of the overall waste disposal picture. There were several much, much bigger piles of trash created by industrial activity to which no one was paying attention.

I've been writing and speaking about that larger trash pile — which I dubbed the Gross National Trash, or GNT — repeatedly, including in my recent book, Strategies for the Green Economy. As I explained it, MSW — which consists of newspaper, cardboard, yard clippings, bottles and cans, other packaging, and various other things people toss out — represented only about 1.5 percent of Gross National Trash. The rest consisted of a long list of industrial debris, including various manufacturing wastes, construction and demolition waste, sludge, hazardous waste, and many other things.

Problem was, that 1992 study was never updated. And while solid waste experts I consulted assured me that the relative amounts probably hadn't changed much, the age of the data bothered me nonetheless.

But I've just stumbled over some much newer data — 15 years newer, to be exact — and while the overall point I was making hasn't changed, the numbers have changed a great deal.

And that raises more questions than answers.

Indeed, it makes me more than a little suspicious.

Here's the gist of the problem. The 1992 data showed that U.S. industry created 13.2 billion tons of GNT. In contrast, MSW that year equaled only 195 million tons — about 1.5 percent of the total.

In 2007, GNT equaled only 2.6 billion tons, while MSW grew to 252 million tons — representing nearly 10 percent of the total.

So, industrial trash dropped by 80 percent, while consumer trash grew by 30 percent. This, during a time when the U.S. population grew by 18 percent (from 255 million to 301 million people) and the U.S. gross domestic product, or GDP, more than doubled (from $6.2 trillion to $13.5 trillion in 2000 dollars).

There are two possible explanations. One is that industry has gotten magnificently more efficient over the past decade and a half, producing a lot more stuff while creating just a fraction of the waste.

The other is that the government — and the rest of us — don't have a clue about how much waste companies produce.

I'm inclined to go with the latter.

Not that the first version doesn't have some merit. Over the past 15 years, companies have gotten much more efficient. For example, in our 2009 State of Green Business report, we tracked year-over-year decreases in the amount of paper and packaging used per dollar of GDP. So, improvements are taking place.

But not to the extent that these data show.

Take industrial non-hazardous waste, for example, a classification that includes effluents from pulp and paper, iron and steel, stone, clay, glass, concrete, food processing, textile manufacturing, plastics and resins manufacturing, chemical manufacturing, water treatment, and other industries and processes. In 1992, the EPA calculated 7.6 billion tons a year of the stuff (39 times more than all of the MSW generated that year). In 2007, says EPA, there was just 214 million tons — a roughly 97 percent decrease (and roughly equal to MSW that year). Where did it all go?

During that same period, hazardous waste — a witch's brew of nearly 500 toxic ingredients found in paints, pesticides, printing ink, and in hundreds of manufacturing processes — plummeted from 240 million tons a year to just 9.6 million tons, a 96 percent decrease.

You catching a theme here?

What's the point? It's that most of us have been focusing on the wrong pile of trash. The principal concern isn't primarily the roughly quarter-billion tons of MSW that we toss out each year, though that's no trivial sum. It's the much larger pile, somewhere between 2.6 billion and 13 billion tons — or maybe more. No one really knows.

But we need to know. The amount of waste we produce — hazardous or not — has implications on our health, wealth, and well being. It impacts our energy, air, and water, and the production of greenhouse gases, among other things. Its mere presence signals manufacturing and marketplace inefficiencies — processes and trading systems in which the creation of waste is an acceptable, affordable outcome.

That's anathema to an economy seeking to become lean and competitive on the world stage, and to a world seeking to use energy, water, materials, and other resources far more wisely while addressing problems like air and water pollution, food security, and climate change.

But how can we aim our economy in the right direction if we don't know where we are?

There are implications for companies. As I wrote in my book (citing the 1992 data):

It’s only a matter of time before the story of GNT gets told, and the public recognizes that for every pound of trash that ends up in municipal landfills, at least 65 more pounds are created upstream by industrial processes—and that a lot of this waste is far more dangerous to environmental and human health than our newspapers and grass clippings. At that point, the locus of concern could shift away from beverage containers, grocery bags, and the other mundane junk of daily life to what happens behind the scenes— the production, crating, storing, and shipping of the goods we buy and use. And interested parties may start asking questions.

The disparate 1992 and 2007 figures on the Gross National Trash are troubling for us all. For all the talk about competitiveness, environmental responsibility, accountability, and public health, we're missing an important piece of the picture.

By the way, the 2007 trash data I fell into recently have never been published. Nor were the 1992 data collected by an EPA employee, since retired. (You can download the Tennessee teleconference document here in PDF; the data in question are on page 10.) The 2007 data were unearthed by an industrious researcher for a magazine article I recently wrote. So, the EPA is collecting this information — albeit sporadically — but not doing anything with it. Given the seemingly poor quality of the data, that's a mixed blessing.

How much trash does U.S. industry really produce each year? Your guess is as good as mine.

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AT&T's Driving Ambition

Today, AT&T made a major announcement: that it will invest more than a half-billion dollars over the next decade to purchase more than 15,000 alternative-fueled vehicles — 8,000 vans powered by compressed natural gas, and another 7,100 hybrid passenger cars. The telecommunications giant estimates that the new vehicles will save 49 million gallons of gasoline and reduce carbon emissions by 211,000 metric tons over the 10-year deployment period — equivalent to removing the emissions from more than 38,600 traditional passenger vehicles for a year.

You can hear a podcast interview I did last week with two AT&T executives about why — and how — they did this.

Making a commitment like this is no mean feat. For starters, it means placing a decade-long bet on a dynamic technological market: No one really knows exactly what the technological landscape of automobiles and delivery vans will look like in 2019 — the fuels, powertrains, and other innovations that will become the state of the art. Moreover, there's the problem of ensuring that there's a critical mass of natural gas fueling stations ready when the vehicles hit the streets. Toward that end, AT&T is contracting to have between 35 and 40 fueling stations built on its property, Jerome Webber, AT&T's vice president of fleet operations, told me last week. That's hardly enough to accommodate 8,000 vehicles, but the company hopes that it will help stimulate a market for more.

In some regards, the AT&T announcement represents another in the continuing series of corporate environmental initiatives that my colleagues and I at GreenBiz.com see (and report on) every day, despite the recession and credit freeze. But it's more than that. It also marks the resurgence of AT&T as an environmental leader.

Say what?

Odds are, you haven't heard much lately about AT&T from an environmental perspective. But the company was a pioneer in such fields as industrial ecology, design for environment, and telework. It still funds an Industrial Ecology Faculty Fellowship Program, annual grants intended "to stimulate interdisciplinary research involving social and environmental issues, engineering, science, economics, management, business, law and public policy issues." The company's iconic Bell Labs (now part of Alcatel-Lucent) fostered and supported some of the leading thinkers on such topics, the ones who wrote the textbooks now used in progressive engineering schools on how to integrate ecological systems thinking into product design and manufacturing.

As GreenBiz.com reported in a 2001 article on AT&T:

Industrial ecology systematically studies the environmental consequences of production and consumption. It addresses product-life-cycle planning that examines how the design, production, use, and final disposal of products affect the environment.

Industrial ecology includes the creation of eco-industrial parks that provide for the cleaner production of goods. The field also considers extended producer responsibility, known as product stewardship; eco-efficiency; and environmental policies that produce social and environmental benefits to the company and to society as a whole.

AT&T is sometimes erroneously credited with inventing the concept of industrial ecology. In fact, it was first introduced to the general public in 1989 by Robert Frosch and Nicholas Gallopoulos, research scientists at General Motors, who believed that

industrial systems should emulate the best features of biological ecosystems, thereby reducing energy and material consumption and waste generation. The benefits of such operations are reduced environmental damage and increased sustainability for both natural resources and human activities.

Today, that's still cutting-edge thinking.

But AT&T — specifically, Thomas E. Graedel and Braden Allenby, two company engineers — popularized the concept, at least among some early green business thought leaders and practitioners. While at AT&T, Allenby, for example, wrote more than 100 publications and four books: "Industrial Ecology," "Design for Environment," Industrial Ecology and the Automobile," and "Industrial Ecology: Policy Framework and Implementation." (He also has contributed scores of thought-provoking essays to GreenBiz.com since its launch in 2000, archived here.)

Design for environment (DfE) is one means by which the principles of industrial ecology can be implemented today, within the overall perspective of a global economy that is increasingly service oriented. As a U.S. EPA fact sheet (Download - PDF) puts it:

DfE pursues industrial ecology principles by requiring that industrial designers and managers think in terms of cycles or complex systems rather than traditional linear process flow diagrams. DfE locates environmental concern within the most positive stages of the production process. Rather than trying to mitigate environmental consequences of production after the products have been defined and the processes designed, DfE encourages consideration of environmental issues to help shape the context of the industrial designer or process engineer in the same way that manufacturability, cost competitiveness, and consumer satisfaction currently shape that context.

And then there's telework, defined as "working from home or nonoffice locations during normal business hours," which AT&T pioneered in 1992. The company became a champion of the concept long before telecommunications and information technology — not to mention rising real estate and facility prices — made working from home a fairly common practice among many large companies. As recently as four years ago, AT&T — which, of course, benefited from sales of telecommunications products and services resulting from telework - boasted $180 million in business benefits annually from increased productivity by employees and reduced real estate needs from telework. (We've brought telework trends up to date in our annual State of Green Business report.)

So, why this trip down memory lane? AT&T isn't the first or only green business pioneer to fall off the radar. (Another early adopter is 3M, whose environmental mission statement was written in 1975 and still sounds fresh today, and who began a highly successful Pollution Prevention Pays program that same year. Haven't heard much from them lately, though their early initiatives continue.) AT&T is basically a different company today than then, having absorbed BellSouth, Cingular, and several smaller companies. (3M, for its part, lost its pollution prevention czar and got distracted by a myriad other things. Every company has a story.)

As Beth Shiroishi, AT&T's VP for Citizenship and Sustainability, told me last week: "At the close of the BellSouth-Cingular merger, we really still had almost four different operating companies with different programs, operations, even different cultures. At that point, we took a look across all the operations and said, 'What are the best practices? What do we want to be from a holistic standpoint?' A lot of good work had continued throughout those mergers, but looking operationally across the board, we took a couple of steps to really manage that, including elevating citizenship and sustainability to the board of directors." AT&T created an officer-level steering committee to help manage sustainability throughout the company, says Shiroishi, "and then we put in place kind of an expert team structure to look at all the issues and integrate that into our business." She says the company is committed as ever to being an environmental leader.

That remains to be seen, but the vehicle commitment represents a respectable re-boot. "We're all fired up about this," says Webber. "This is the right thing to do and we're doing it, and that's exciting. If you think about it, you've heard certain things coming out from the administration about infrastructure and jobs. This is the real deal."

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Clean Energy Trends 2009

How is clean energy technology faring amid the countervailing forces of Obama stimulus and economic meltdown? Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder, my colleagues at Clean Edge, and I have just issued the 2009 report on clean energy trends — our seventh annual — and you won't be surprised to learn that there's both good news and bad.

The free report can be downloaded here

The good news is that clean energy continues on a blistering rate of growth — increasing 53 percent from $75.8 billion in 2007 to $115.9 billion in revenues in 2008, based on our study of three key technologies: solar, wind, and biofuels. And the growth will continue. We forecast that by 2018, these three technologies will have revenues of $325.1 billion.

The bad news: The clean-energy sector faces considerable challenges moving forward. A sinking stock market continues to plague the initial public offering markets, with only a small handful of energy-related IPO listings on U.S. exchanges in 2008. This means that venture capitalists and other investors are faced with a dearth of exit opportunities for their current portfolio companies, making it harder for new companies to garner investments.

Severely tightened credit markets also began to take their toll. In late 2008 and early 2009, the extent of constrained credit became apparent, with a range of clean-energy companies delaying plans, laying off staff, or scuttling projects entirely.

Despite all this, the growth has been impressive. To wit:

• Solar photovoltaics (including modules, system components, and installation) will grow from a $29.6 billion industry in 2008 to $80.6 billion by 2018. Annual installations reached more than 4 GW worldwide in 2008, a fourfold increase from four years earlier, when the solar PV market reached the gigawatt milestone for the first time.

• Wind power (new installation capital costs) is projected to expand from $51.4 billion in 2008 to $139.1 billion in 2018. Last year's global wind power installations reached a record 27,000 MW. In the U.S., which accounted for more than 8,000 MW, wind installations represented more than 40 percent of total new electricity generating capacity brought online in 2008 — and moved the U.S. ahead of Germany as the world's leading generator of wind energy.

• Biofuels (global production and wholesale pricing of ethanol and biodiesel) reached $34.8 billion in 2008 and are projected to grow to $105.4 billion by 2018. In 2008 the global biofuels market consisted of more than 17 billion gallons of ethanol and 2.5 billion gallons of biodiesel production worldwide. For the first time, ethanol leader Brazil got more than 50 percent of its total national automobile transportation fuels from bioethanol, eclipsing petroleum use for the first time in any major market.

As we did in previous reports, this year's offers our take on five key energy trends. This year, several have to do with the smart grid and the integration of information technologies and micropower. We also look at the growth of storage technologies and emergence of burgeoning clean energy markets outside the U.S., including in emerging economies as diverse as Aruba and Serbia.

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