Reinventing the City to Combat Climate Change

Cities produce 80 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, and that number will grow as more people in the developing world move to urban centers. How we develop urban infrastructure over the next 30 years will determine whether cities become a growing force for environmental destruction or primary sources for ecological rejuvenation.

 strategy-business.com

From Dr. Hazel Henderson:

The GREEN TRANSITION SCOREBOARD™ from ETHICAL MARKETS, the independent global multi-media company, tracks total private investment in companies growing the green economy since 2007.  The mid-2010 update shows a rise to $1,646,719,228,993 from $1.24 trillion at the end of December 2009.  The report was released today by founder-CEO HAZEL HENDERSON, D.Sc.Hon, FRSA , futurist and author of Ethical Markets: Growing The Green Economy (Chelsea Green, 2006).  Dr. Henderson has advised the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment, the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Engineering, tracking these technologies since the 1970s.

Dr. Henderson, creator of the GREEN TRANSITION SCOREBOARD™ (GTS), stressed its vision and purpose, “Our mission of fostering ethical markets and growing the green economy worldwide is shared by millions of entrepreneurs, inventors, scientists, engineers, venture capitalists, investors, pension funds, as well as civic groups, academics, students and employees of incumbent industries in the fossilized sectors in many countries.  This requires the revolution in corporate and national accounts we have long advocated – now underway by the new International Integrated Reporting Committee (IIRC) steered by 33 organizations, including the Global Reporting Initiative, the UN Principles of Responsible Investing and many other pension funds and accounting bodies worldwide, with the backing of the International and US Accounting Standards Boards.”

As Matthew Kiernan, founder of Innovest and founder-CEO of Inflection Point Capital Management, author of Investing in a Sustainable World, explains, “The GTS makes a uniquely useful contribution to the necessary macro-economic transition in at least two important respects: it adopts a much more comprehensive and therefore effective working definition of a green economy than is usually the case, and it also provides a robust and consistent framework for measuring our progress towards it.“ 

“The GTS is an important milestone in measuring the increasing economic viability of the CleanTech universe,” says Stuart Valentine, president of Iowa Progressive Asset Management, a leading US investment firm.  “Since 1987, we have guided our investors towards companies leading the growing green economy: the Sustainability Sector.”

Henderson adds, “The GREEN TRANSITION SCOREBOARD™ measures concrete progress as we traverse this great global transition from the Industrial Era to the information-rich, cleaner, healthier and greener Solar Age.”  Reports confirm this, such as the July 2010 study Solar and Nuclear Costs – the Historic Crossover by economist John O. Blackburn, former Duke University Chancellor, which finds that solar energy is now cheaper than nuclear.

Helen Rake, principal for Collins Capital Management, Inc., in Jacksonville agrees: “The Green Transition Scoreboard™ gives our ESG clients a true barometer of significant change going on in corporations around the globe.” 

Ethical Markets, its partners Mercado Etico, the World Business Academy and the thousands of groups linking to Ethical Markets see this Green Transition as inevitable, viable and achievable, by scaling up existing technologies and energy efficiency gains.  This website links to many studies, computer models and reports which indicate that investing $1 trillion every year until 2020 can ramp up material and energy efficiencies, reduce costs of wind, solar, geothermal, water, sustainable land-use and forestry, which together with smart infrastructure, transport, building and urban re-design, can accelerate the Green Transition worldwide. 

Timothy Nash, M.Sc., Ethical Markets’ Senior Advisor and Director of Sustainability Research, compiles and analyzes the Green Transition Scoreboard™.  “The mid-2010 total of over $1.6 trillion puts G-20 countries on track to reach our 2020 target of $10 trillion.  This $10 trillion goal is much less than the $23 trillion U.S. taxpayers are liable, including bailouts since 2008 (www.sigtarp.gov) and only represents 10% of global pension and institutional portfolio assets of some $120 trillion,” says Nash. “This figure has outpaced even the most optimistic expectations for investments in the green economy, providing tangible evidence that investors are shifting their assets and that momentum is building for a green economic transition.”

Henderson and Nash share the hope that this data and the shift to “triple bottom line,” ESG accounting standards will encourage pension funds to follow the lead of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC) to shift more of their portfolios away from risky investments in the fossilized sectors and commodities speculation to more direct investments in growing the green sectors.

Nash adds, “Our new totals are broken down into five categories: Renewable Energy; Efficiency and Green Construction; Cleantech; Smart Grid; and Corporate R&D. (Click here for report).  We welcome all enquiries!”

Ethical Markets Executive Director Rosalinda Sanquiche, M.Sc., says “Individual investors see the green economy growing on Main Street.  We welcome non-profit groups to access the full report by installing our GTS icon with a link to www.greentransitionscoreboard.com on their websites, free of charge for the next 30 days.”

Contacts:

·       Dr. Hazel Henderson, President, Ethical Markets Media, www.ethicalmarkets.com, hazel.henderson@ethicalmarkets.com, 904-829-3140

·       Rosalinda Sanquiche, Executive Director, Ethical Markets Media, rosalinda.sanquiche@ethicalmarkets.com, 904-826-1381

·       Timothy Jack Nash, Ethical Markets Media Senior Advisor and Director of Sustainability Research; President, Strategic Sustainable Investments, tim.nash@ethicalmarkets.com, 416-821-9179

·        

St. Augustine, FL – August 3, 2010 –

Following the start of the industrial revolution, in 1824 Jean-Baptiste Fourier discovered a global warming “greenhouse” effect and in 1896 Swedish and American scientists independently concluded that CO2 was the likely cause of global warming.

Nearly 90 years later in 1987 the WMO and UNEP established a scientific advisory body called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which issued its First Assessment Report in 1990, finding that the planet had warmed by 0.5°C in the past century and would rise further by 0.3°C per decade in the 21st century, accompanied by global mean sea level rises of 6 cm per decade.

In 2007 the IPCC released its Fourth Assessment Report, concluding with 90% confidence that human activity is causing climate change and that “Global GHG emissions due to human activities have grown since pre-industrial times with an increase of 70% between 1970 and 2004.”

In 2008 our planet was estimated to contain 385 ppm (parts per million) of CO2 in its atmosphere, the highest concentration of CO2 for more than 630,000 years. This is widely agreed to be due to human industrial advancement, specifically the production and consumption of power from the burning of fossil fuels that are estimated to have caused around 85% of CO2 emissions.

It is known that global temperature increase must be kept within 2°C to prevent an irreversible chain reaction of greenhouse gas release from forests, peat bogs, Siberian permafrost and oceans, which would change the planet’s ecosystems irrevocably. To ensure this temperature rise does not occur concentration of CO2 must not pass 450 ppm, which means reducing CO2 emissions to 60% below 1990 levels before 2030.

Source:  http://blog.willowrivers.com/

Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway.

“Our system can handle 400 cubic meters per hour,” Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.

Why does neither the U.S. government nor U.S. energy companies have on hand the cleanup technology available in Europe?

Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules.

The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn’t good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million — if water isn’t at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.

Read more: http://www.financialpost.com/Avertible+catastrophe/3203808/story.html#ixzz0tCSCgWYk

BP’s flawed handling of the environmental crisis in the Gulf of Mexico is creating an identity crisis for the company, according to management professors Hamid Bouchikhi of the ESSEC Business School in France and John R. Kimberly of the Wharton School.

The two wrote about BP’s equally faulty treatment of the 2005 explosion at the Texas City refinery in their book, The Soul of the Corporation: How to Manage the Identity of Your Company. Now they offer six steps that BP should have taken to mitigate the damage — and that other companies should consider when it’s their turn to cope with crisis.

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/2519.cfm

Norges Bank Investment Management, the arm of the Norwegian central bank which manages the assets of the NOK2.7trn (€347bn) Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global, has enhanced its website to allow users to search its equity and fixed income holdings and voting records.

As well as offering continuous updates on the fund’s market value, NBIM says there’s also a new search device enabling users to find information on the fund’s holdings and voting records “by region, country and company”. The fund owns around 1% of the world’s listed companies.

The development enables readers to see the giant fund’s equity holdings in, say, China.

A quick glance through the data reveals that the fund has 941 investments in the country, worth around NOK23.9bn (€3bn). An analysis throws up some interesting snippets, such as the fact that it has 55 investments in the Cayman Islands worth some NOK4.5bn (€556m).

For the whole story on Responsible-Investor.com see:

Giant Norway fund manager puts searchable holdings and voting data on website

An awareness of how a range of global developments is threatening the livelihoods of many millions of the world’s citizens in the early 21st century is sharpening. The realities of climate change and environmental destruction, widening socio-economic inequality, wars and conflicts, and unsustainable transport and business models are among these developments. A striking aspect of the response to them at some senior levels is the combination of genuine engagement and - just when the argument might be getting somewhere - mental blockage. If the latter could be overcome, the results in public discussion and policy decision could be momentous. Read more by Paul Rogers on Open Democracy.