You Are Viewing Sustainability

by Mike Casey

Recently, I’ve been watching Saul Griffith’s “Climate Change Recalculated,” a brilliant talk book about the connection between our individual carbon footprint (he presents his own in precisely measured details) and what it will actually take to power the future with clean energy. I’m coupling that with a read of Amory Lovins’ “Reinventing Fire,” which looks at how we can convert the economy to a much cleaner basis.

In some ways, I consider myself a good test for the challenges these authors discuss about. I’m a professional cleantech booster who wants his lifestyle and consumption habits to reflect that to which I’ve devoted my professional life. However, based on what we as a society actually need to do on an individual basis to avert climate disaster, I’m not even close. For instance, my wife and I would love to make our typical, 28-year-old, 3,500-square-foot, suburban, Colonial home more energy efficient, even net-zero and/or “off the grid” if possible, yet we’ve been stumped by some pretty involved decisions on how to get there: e.g., tear-down or do an extensive green retrofit? What to do with the old materials in the home? What do you do in Virginia, with its scarcity of clean energy incentives, to handle up-front costs? How do you find someone to handle the work who gets green and won’t rip you off?

If I had the money, I’d do a complete dismantling of our current home and build a net-zero home out of hay bales. But my wife has…well, different tastes, and the real estate agent friends we’ve talked with all say that the home will sell for far less if it’s a net-zero home, because there are none like it in the neighborhood.

We’ve gotten wrapped around the axle, so to speak, on some of these decisions for a couple of years now. But we have recently had a catalyst: our furnace motor broke in the middle of the winter. We have a high-efficiency, wood-burning insert we used to keep warm over several days while we faced the choice of: a) replacing the motor ($800); or b) spending several thousand dollars on a new furnace.

Ours is a cheapie, and going on 15 years old – the point at which the furnace company says they begin to wear out. We looked into various options, but for now decided – at the risk of feeling like we’re punting on making tough decisions – to simply replace the motor. Now that that’s taken care of, and our family is warm again, we’re planning on starting to interview green design/remodeling firms, to figure out who knows how to make an existing home really green. We invite you to follow us on our journey over the coming weeks and months.

I’ve been a fan of Southwest Airlines for years. It’s not luxury, but it usually gets you there with a passenger-friendly, problem-solving approach to customers’ needs. But here’s a standout exception that suggests that even Southwest can be careless with its brand: Just try to get them to stop sending you junk mail.

For more than 18 months, I (really me plus my awesome executive assistant) have been calling Southwest Airlines to ask them to stop sending me junk mail solicitations of various sorts, particularly credit card offers. The odyssey required to get off a mailing list is emblematic of how far you have to go to just reduced the waste that’s shoveled at you. The default is against –- really against — those who want to opt out of wasting stuff.

Over these many months, all calls to Southwest have been answered with helpful promises to stop the solicitations. They haven’t. After two more credit card offers  arrived in my P.O. Box last month, I called the reservation desk –- again –- and explained my past efforts and growing irritation. Call customer relations in Dallas, I was told (214-932-0333).

The customer relations representative who answered first insisted on getting my frequent flyer number (It wasn’t handy – I was calling from train to work.), but she eventually found me. I’m already on the no-mail list, she said. Why the credit card solicitations, I asked? We “aren’t sending them – it’s the credit card company,” she said.

Why is the passenger-friendly airline handing permission to a credit card company to irritate passengers? “It’s got your logo and colors on it,” I said.

“There’s nothing we can do about it,” I was told. “You’ll have to call Chase Visa.”

I said I’d do it, but I requested that she identify and talk to a person with some authority at Southwest over these brand-control decisions. Shouldn’t the airline make it easier for customers to get off annoying junk mail lists that are used to distribute materials carrying its logo? She demurred by saying she’d put a note in my file. I pressed further, and was told my concerns would go in the “log,” a “monthly summary seen by other leaders at the company.”

On to Chase Visa. The first call to the number I was given (800-792-0001) put my assistant into an endless voice mail loop. She finally found out it was the wrong number. The correct number (866-436-4335) had its own voice mail maze, but it was eventually answered by someone who insisted that I was only on the list because I’d asked to be on it (really?), and that only I could call to get off the list.

Why’s that? Because it’s such an honor to get Chase Visa’s Southwest-logoed junk mail?

This is obviously dumb on several levels.

I still get Southwest-branded junk mail, even though I’ve signed up for the 41pounds.org program, as well as the Direct Marketing Association’s “Mail Preference Service,” now called “DMAchoice.” Both are opt-in programs to opt out of junk mail. As an individual consumer, it’s dumb to make me jump through hoops to get off the Southwest-Chase junk mail list.

For Southwest as a company, it’s dumb for an airline that brands itself as a down-to-earth, problem-solving company to hand brand control over to the annoying practices of Chase Visa.

For a country in recession, it’s dumb not to be cutting waste and promoting efficiency. Why make it hard for people not to waste stuff? And, why not start with the obviously dumb stuff, like junk mail being an opt-in proposition, or hiding recycling bins in the corners of malls and airports far from trash cans? Or why not have wait staff at restaurants ask people if they want a throwaway straw before just inserting one in every drink? (I now get about a 40% success rate when I ask that they leave it out.) Or, how about not leaving retail shop doors open on the hottest days of the year?

No doubt, it’s an ocean of avoidable wasteful practices out there. They’re so common, that trying to change it can seem hopeless. What else can you do? Confucius once said, “Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.”

So, I’ll go call Chase Visa tomorrow and see what happens. Wish me luck.

UPDATE 9/26: I spoke with Chase Visa today and they have removed me from their mailing list. To their credit, they saw the blog post before I could even call them to let them know about it.

UPDATE 10/21: I had a good conversation on this matter with Jonathan Clarkson, Director of Rapid Rewards at Southwest Airlines. Mr. Clarkson could not have been more pleasant and persistent in trying to reach me, which I very much appreciate. According to Mr. Clarkson, Southwest Airlines’  customer representative should have been able to take me off the Chase Visa list, as well as the Southwest Airlines list.  That’s good to know. In addition, we had a nice conversation about sustainability. Thanks again to Mr. Clarkson for following up.

We received an email with the above graphic from the Cleantech Group and thought it was worth passing along. The main point is that “[a]n influx of investment in late stage water companies is set to make 2012 the strongest year yet in terms of VC investments.” Also of interest is that “wastewater treatment technologies are getting over half of the global funds invested in water in 2012.” All in all, based on that information, this definitely looks like a sector to keep our eyes on in coming years.

The National Clean Energy Summit was held yesterday in Las Vegas, with an extremely impressive list of speakers, including former President Bill Clinton, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, former ARPA-E Director Dr. Arun Majumdar, Peter Fox-Penner of the Brattle Group, “Revenge of the Electric Car” director Chris Paine, and numerous others. We wanted to highlight just a few of these impressive clean energy leaders, innovators, policymakers and thinkers here on Scaling Green. Appearing in the video above, for instance, is Elon Musk of Tesla Motors, who among other things founded SpaceX, co-founded PayPal, and “created the first viable electric car of the modern era, the Tesla Roadster.”

Here, Musk discusses the crucial importance of sustainable energy. According to Musk, “unless we solve the sustainable energy problem this century, we will face massive economic collapse, not to mention substantial environmental damage that’s going to affect hundreds of millions if not billions of people in a terrible way.” “Obviously,” Musk adds, “we must have sustainable energy, because…otherwise we have unsustainable energy and we’re screwed.” No argument from us!

When one considers the potentially biggest “bang for the buck” we can get in terms of energy cost savings and pollution reductions, the building sector certainly ranks high on the list. According to the U.S. Energy Department, the U.S. building sector “alone accounted for 8% of global primary energy consumption in 2008,” with nearly 40% of U.S. energy consumed – and carbon dioxide emitted – by buildings. Thus, as the EPA’s “Green Building” website points out, building green comes with enormous benefits – environmental, economic, and social. In addition, although green building “may cost more up front, [it] can save money over the life of the building through lower operating costs.” That’s a win-win situation no matter how you look at it.

Fortunately, the trend towards green building is growing rapidly in the United States and worldwide. According to a recent press release by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), for instance, “LEED-certified existing buildings are outpacing their newly built counterparts,” with “square footage of LEED-certified existing buildings surpass[ing] LEED-certified new construction by 15 million square feet on a cumulative basis” in the United States as of December 2011.  As Rick Fedrizzi, President, CEO & Founding Chair, of the USGBC, points out:

The U.S. is home to more than 60 billion square feet of existing commercial buildings, and we know that most of those buildings are energy guzzlers and water  sieves…Greening these buildings takes hands-on work, creating precious jobs especially for construction workers. Making these existing buildings energy and water efficient has an enormous positive impact on the building’s cost of operations. And the indoor air quality improvements that go with less toxic cleaning solutions and better filtration create healthier places to live, work and learn.

Green building success stories include not just new construction, but also retrofits, like the Empire State Building earning a LEED Gold rating, which will “reduce energy use by more than $4.4 million annually, cut carbon emissions by 105,000 metric tons over a 15-year period and provide a payback in slightly more than three years.” Not too shabby.  Another green building success story is the U.S. Treasury Department building, certified in December 2011 as LEED Gold – “the oldest building in the world ever to have gotten any type of LEED certification.”

Then there’s the U.S. military, which a little over a year ago adopted “ASHRAE Standard 189.1, a standard for green building and sustainability” that “requires that facility construction projects follow specified requirements and guidance” in terms of “siting, energy efficiency, cool roofs, metering, storm water management and indoor and outdoor water consumption.” With more than 954 million square feet of Army buildings and structures worldwide, the impact of this policy change could be huge in terms of energy and cost savings, as well as in terms of pollution reductions. At the same time, the military is also helping to jumpstart rooftop solar, with the recent announcement of “SolarStrong, an audacious, $1 billion project that aims to double the number of residential photovoltaic systems across the U.S. through the installation of rooftop solar arrays on 160,000 homes and other buildings like community centers and administrative buildings on the country’s military bases.”

Given the importance and progress being made in the green building sector in recent years, we were pleased to see global green building consultant Jerry Yudelson’s optimistic outlook on green building trends for 2012. Yudelson certainly should know what he’s talking about, as he is a “registered professional engineer” who “holds degrees in civil and environmental engineering from Caltech and Harvard,” and who “has worked as a management/marketing consultant for more than 200 state government, utilities, local governments, Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, engineering firms and product manufacturers during the past 25 years.” According to Yudelson, the outlook for green building in 2012 is bright, despite ongoing economic problems. For instance, Yudelson predicts:

• “The global green building movement will continue to accelerate, as more countries begin to create their own green building incentives and developing their own Green Building Councils. More than 90 countries with incipient or established green building organizations, on all continents, will drive considerable green building growth in 2012.”
• “The focus of the green building industry will continue its switch from new building design and construction to greening existing buildings.”
• “Zero-net-energy buildings will become increasingly commonplace, in both residential and commercial sectors, as LEED and ENERGY STAR certifications and labels have become too commonplace to confer competitive advantage among building owners.”
• “Local and state governments will step up their mandates for green buildings for both themselves and the private sector. We’ll see at least 20 new cities with commercial sector green building mandates…”
• “Solar power use in buildings will continue to grow with the prospect of increasing utility focus on aggressive state-level renewable power standards (RPS) for 2020. As before, third-party financing partnerships will continue to grow and provide capital for large rooftop systems such as on warehouses and big box retail stores.”

One of Yudelson’s points bears additional emphasis: the need for local and state governments – and, we’d add, the federal government – to require that buildings achieve higher and higher levels of energy efficiency, just as with appliances, and that they provide consumers and others with transparent information about how much energy they consume. As Stephen Lacey of Climate Progress pointed out when he spoke as part of our “Communicating Energy” Lecture Series last November, energy efficiency may not be as “sexy” as “big, first-of-a-kind projects or sexy, innovative technologies,” but it’s extremely important nonetheless.  Just in the U.S. education sector alone, for example, it’s been estimated that more energy efficient school buildings “could save $20 billion in energy costs alone over the next 10 years.” That’s money that we’re currently throwing out the window, almost literally, which could be saved for use in actually educating kids in a healthy environment, not burning dirty fossil fuels in order to heat and cooling the leaky, uncomfortable spaces they’re attempting to learn in now.

The bottom line of all this is clearcut: green building, both new and retrofit, is crucial if we’re going to meet our energy, economic, and environmental objectives for the 21^st century. It’s also a huge business opportunity you certainly won’t want to miss.