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Bloomberg New Energy Finance has just published its 2017 New Energy Outlook, and the future looks rosy for renewables. That's welcome news considering the gloomy scenarios painted by some energy observers after President Trump announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change.

In fact, the news is so good that it's a little hard to believe -- and sure enough, there is some bad news in the new report. But first, let's get to the good stuff.

A rosy future for renewables, with or without White House leadership

Before we get to the Bloomberg report, let's note that after President Trump announced that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris Agreement, the U.S. business community swiftly stepped up to fill the climate change leadership vacuum along with mayors, governors, environmental organizations and many others.

That level of objection to Trump Administration policy should not be a surprise, considering that the U.S. is (still) a democracy, and the current occupant of the White House lost the popular vote by a significant margin.

In other words, the Trump withdrawal did nothing to hold back American leadership on the granular end of the scale. If anything, the president has handed the U.S. business community a golden opportunity to promote the strength of the corporate social responsibility movement along with capitalism, innovation, and other conventional aspects of the U.S. economic sector.

Now, let's turn to that report.

Coal-killing solar power strikes a chord...

The full New Energy report is available from Bloomberg, but for those of you on the go, a Bloomberg article about the report summarizes the whole thing in the headline:

Solar Power Will Kill Coal Sooner Than You Think

That pretty much says it all. The coal industry has been pinning its hopes on the rapidly growing energy markets of China, India and the rest of Asia, but it looks like that door has slammed shut.

According to the report, the cost of solar will compete with new coal power plants in those countries by 2021 -- and solar is already competitive with coal in the important German and U.S. markets.

The effect on global fossil fuel emissions is expected to be significant:

The scenario suggests green energy is taking root more quickly than most experts anticipate. It would mean that global carbon dioxide pollution from fossil fuels may decline after 2026, a contrast with the International Energy Agency’s central forecast, which sees emissions rising steadily for decades to come.

...offshore wind and energy storage chime in, too

The report notes that offshore wind has been the most expensive option among "mainstream" renewables, but that is rapidly changing:

The cost of offshore wind farms, until recently the most expensive mainstream renewable technology, will slide 71 percent, making turbines based at sea another competitive form of generation.

The explosive growth of investment in energy storage is also expected to promote an earlier-than-expected decline in fossil fuel emissions.

Energy storage provides more opportunities to introduce solar and wind on a distributed generation basis in addition to utility scale operations.

Investment in mobile energy storage -- aka electric vehicle batteries -- is also part of the rapid fossil emissions reduction scenario.

Bloomberg does not particularly highlight the emergence of renewable hydrogen as an energy storage option for both mobile and stationary uses, but that could also become a factor if R&D continues apace.

Natural gas strikes a sour note...

Like many other energy policy analysts, Bloomberg includes natural gas in its stable of emission-reducing factors.

That's somewhat problematic considering the mounting evidence that fugitive methane emissions occur all along the natural gas supply chain. Gas storage facilities and air quality and water quality impacts related to drilling operations are a particular cause for concern, as are earthquakes and other unforeseen consequences of the shale gas boom.

...but it can't rain on the renewable energy parade

On the other hand, Bloomberg notes that renewables own the spotlight in the energy story of the future. Costs for wind and solar have fallen off a cliff in recent years, and Bloomberg sees more to come:

BNEF’s conclusions about renewables and their impact on fossil fuels are most dramatic. Electricity from photovoltaic panels costs almost a quarter of what it did in 2009 and is likely to fall another 66 percent by 2040. Onshore wind, which has dropped 30 percent in price in the past eight years, will fall another 47 percent by the end of BNEF’s forecast horizon.

All this is bad news for President Trump, who made bringing back coal jobs a central theme of his campaign.

That promise was already known to be an empty one among energy analysts, and judging by the latest opinion polls it looks like the general public has also begun to realize that most if not all of the Trump campaign was smoke and mirrors.

Trump has doggedly pursued pro-coal rhetoric during his tenure in the White House, but his own Energy Secretary is a dedicated champion of renewables. The "mystery" grid study notwithstanding, Energy Department research dollars continue to flow into advanced clean energy technology.

Meanwhile, power companies have continued to announce new coal plant shut-downs.

Here's Bloomberg on the topic:

Capacity of coal will plunge even in the U.S., where President Donald Trump is seeking to stimulate fossil fuels. BNEF expects the nation’s coal-power capacity in 2040 will be about half of what it is now after older plants come offline and are replaced by cheaper and less-polluting sources such as gas and renewables.

Now that the president is officially under investigation for obstruction of justice, he will probably have less time than ever to dedicate to reviving the coal industry.

That's bad news for coal miners, but it's a good opportunity for the private sector to roll up its sleeves and find ways to bring new jobs to communities that are left holding the short end of the stick.

How you can help

Now that the New Energy Outlook's good news about renewables is out of the way, here's the bad news in terms of climate change:

Although the world’s power sector emissions reach a peak within a decade, the rate of decline in emissions is not nearly enough for the climate. A further $5.3 trillion investment in 3.9TW of zero - carbon capacity will be needed place the power sector on a 2°C trajectory.

If you are a business owner or manager and you want to help nudge the rate of investment along for renewables, you can participate in a new global corporate survey launched by the International Renewable Energy Agency.

The survey includes any company of any size that uses energy. It's designed to help promote more efficient national policies for clean energy investment, and to showcase best practices and models for success.

Image (screenshot): via Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

According to the NGO Mighty Earth, one of South Korea’s largest conglomerates has produced a massive amount of palm oil with alleged links to deforestation in Indonesia. But the company, POSCO Daewoo, has not found any takers amongst many of the world’s largest buyers of this key ingredient, which by most accounts is in half of the world’s processed foods and personal care products.

The result, insists Mighty, is that companies are hearing the message that deforestation can pose significant risks to their business, as companies increasingly become serious about ensuring that their palm oil supplies are derived from more responsible sources. And this is also good news for certification organizations such as Rainforest Alliance and the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), the latter of which now says the proportion of the global supply of palm oil that can be traced as responsibly sourced has reached an all-time high of 21 percent.

“POSCO Daewoo has been rapidly clearing Indonesia’s last pristine rainforests and is finally ready to cash in on its destruction,” said Deborah Lapidus, Mighty’s campaigns director. “But there’s one big problem for the company: The global marketplace is resoundingly rejecting POSCO Daewoo’s palm oil, demonstrating yet again that deforestation is increasingly bad for business.”

POSCO Daewoo, which touts itself as the largest trading company in Korea, operates a plantation of 34,195 hectares (132 square miles) in the southeastern region of the remote province of Papua. Satellite imagery and data compiled by Mighty suggested that while more of the global palm oil industry pledged to halt deforestation within its supply chains, POSCO Daewoo was rapidly clear-cutting their concessions. Mighty claims that about 9,900 hectares of forests in this land have been lost since November 2015, and almost one quarter of that amount was cleared during the first few months of this year alone.

As most of the land cleared was considered primary forest critical for endangered species’ habitat, Mighty says that any purchase of palm oil from POSCO Daewoo would run afoul of companies’ commitments to the RSPO. Furthermore, any procurement of palm oil from this region would violate most companies’ “no deforestation” supply chain policies. To date, POSCO Daewoo itself has not issued any anti-deforestation commitment. Mighty says it has obtained the plantation’s business plans, which reportedly indicate that the company will continue to deforest vast regions of its concession.

But Mighty went further than simply issuing a warning that the purchase of POSCO Daewoo’s palm oil would make companies complicit in the deforestation of virgin rainforests. The organization reached out to dozens of international palm oil buyers to see they were buying, or considering purchasing, palm oil from POSCO Daewoo. In addition, Mighty’s researchers also reached out to investors to inquire whether they were financing POSCO Daewoo or the specific plantation in question.

Of the almost 50 responses Mighty received, not one company said it currently sources palm oil from POSCO Daewoo or the plantation. And 20 firms said they would specifically exclude POSCO Daewoo and its plantation from their supply chains or investment portfolios until they could become compliant with their sourcing policies.

Mighty acknowledges that POSCO Daewoo may not be ready to release this palm oil to the markets quite yet. It could also be possible that POSCO is selling to another regional company, Korindo, which Mighty has criticized in the past for its alleged deforestation practices. Nevertheless, what is important about this development is that it shows the global marketplace is ready to reject palm oil that has links to any measure of deforestation.

Image credit: Mighty Earth

 

 

By Bob Best, Head of Energy and Sustainability, JLL

Carbon neutrality is about to go primetime in college campuses across the country. Already, a handful of smaller-sized colleges like Colby College, Middlebury College, and Green Mountain College have become carbon-neutral, while many more have goals to reach neutrality in the near future, including large institutions like the University of California system, which plans to reach carbon neutrality by 2025.

Aspiring for net zero carbon emissions is a natural extension of higher education’s growing thirst for sustainability. And according to JLL’s new report, it’s a goal that’s becoming more achievable. It’s also more appealing to the diverse set of stakeholders comprising any campus community, from students and their parents to faculty, administrators, alumni, donors and the board of trustees.

Many of those constituents can appreciate carbon neutrality programs for their pragmatic benefits, such as cutting energy costs and earning rebates and incentives, or anticipating potential city and state energy and carbon mandates in the future.

There’s also the positive feeling associated with participating in a campus community that walks the talk of social and environmental responsibility. The power of such perception is not insignificant: According to Princeton Review’s Guide to Green Colleges, 61 percent of prospective college students say that having information about a school’s environmental programs would influence their application or enrollment decisions.

So, what can you do to rally on your institution’s neutrality goals?

Seven considerations on the road to carbon neutrality

Universities have traditionally been at the leading edge of sustainability initiatives. With the following in mind, they can stay ahead of the carbon-neutral trend, too.

 

1. Keep it interdisciplinary from the get-go—and beyond. Academia wouldn’t be academia without dialogue, so open the doors for inclusive discussion at the earliest planning stages. I suggest creating sub-committees of potential stakeholders, including students, faculty, admin, and operational staff alike. Engage them in discussing both the benefits and challenges of going carbon-neutral, in terms of environmental and economic impact, as well as personal comfort and convenience. Nurture their participation throughout planning and implementation, which will also help foster widespread adoption in your efforts.


2. See how you measure up. If you haven’t done so recently, then I recommend getting a campus-wide assessment of energy usage to identify opportunities for saving. Also consider an occupancy analysis to learn when space is underused, so that you can reduce or even turn off heating and cooling systems. You might turn up space that is entirely unneeded, and could even reveal space that is so underused, its occupants could be redistributed.Benchmarking sustainability practices amongst your peers can also help you not only understand where you are, encourage stakeholders to make bigger investments. Track the metrics that make most sense for your facilities, such as energy efficiency savings or percentage of renewable energy use.


3. Don’t let the small picture interfere with big goals. Putting too much emphasis on fast payback can cost you in the long run. While there can be merit in quick wins like a straightforward lighting retrofit, it’s very possible that more meaningful long-term results are possible with a project with more up-front costs. Focus on long-term value, not short-term points. When possible and appropriate, organize pilot programs of significant projects, so that you can better demonstrate long-term benefits of a major infrastructure update, for example.


4. Invest in smart buildings and renewables. There are many ways to tap ever-advancing smart technology. For example, wireless sensors can remotely monitor and control building equipment to make HVAC truly on-demand. Commissioning, while the most effective way to reduce energy, is expensive. Smart buildings can facilitate ongoing commissioning which can not only prevent equipment failure before it happens, but also keep track of the number of equipment failures, in turn notifying the capital planning process which equipment may need replacing. Using renewable energy generation is the shortest path to carbon neutrality.

   Meanwhile the costs of renewable energy are falling, and are now on par with conventional energy sources in many areas. Onsite generation may be a longer-term goal, but there are other ways to “go renewable” with little to no up-front cost, like finding a third party renewable provider or negotiating a renewable power purchase agreement. Combined with energy storage or microgrid, the renewables may ensure campus resiliency. For example when much of Manhattan south of Midtown was blacked out during the Hurricane Sandy, the lights were on at most of New York University, as was the heat and hot water.



5. Bring carbon-neutrality to long-term capital planning. Aging buildings are a fixture at many institutions, with a glut of 1960-1975-era buildings in need of update. This can actually be an advantage to carbon neutrality programs, if you ensure its place in capital planning. One study by Sightlines and the University of New Hampshire found that shifting capital investments to building exteriors, mechanical systems, and utility makes the most progress toward reducing energy usage and greenhouse gas emissions.


6. Look for and leverage grants and incentives. Every city and state has its own potential perks—and they’re worthy of investigation. For example, the University of California is using a $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to build a net-zero-energy community at its Davis campus.


7. Amplify the goals; celebrate the successes. Share your goal-oriented policy with the entire campus community. Make sure everyone knows not only that you are going for carbon-neutral, but why you are doing it and how they are helping. Get the credit you deserve for each success, using every communications channel you have to document successes like new certifications or metrics milestones.

 

Achieving carbon neutrality is becoming less a pipe dream, and more a practical goal. Where is your university on the journey to carbon-neutral?

 

Image credit Roman Boed, Flickr

Small landowners are the unsung heroes of the U.S. forest industry. We often think of public forests as the key source of the U.S. wood supply, but in fact, that resource only amounts to about a quarter of the total acreage that is harvested for wood products in the U.S. The rest comprises stock supplied by landowners that have dedicated their acreages to maintaining U.S. forest growth and supply.

There have been a variety of studies of the U.S. forest system in recent years to determine how sustainable these two forest systems really are. A 2010 report published by the National Forest Service for example, yielded some surprising facts:

• More than 75 percent of the private forests is made up of small landowners who own less than 5,000 acres of forest, most of which are spread across the Southeast U.S. in small parcels.


• Some 40 percent of those small holdings are actually managed as farms, many with an eye on sustainable forest management;


• And despite the abundance of small commercial land holdings, "the means and ability of owners to practice good forestry vary widely."

In recent decades there has been an effort to coalesce that sustainable movement, with tree farm operators, mills, distributors product manufacturers and environmental organizations coming together to build networks that will ensure healthy forest management through certification and cooperative measures.

In the forests of Southeast Arkansas, where small landowners have invested in the timber industry for generations, that partnership has become invaluable. It has for the paper and wood product manufacturers as well, who look to small landowners to supply good-quality wood and want to know that those tree farms will be there in decades to come.

And so do the distributors, who know that the environmental health of dozens of small tree farms in a given area is inextricably linked to the viability of the manufacturing company they get their paper and wood from.

One company that has come to appreciate that partnership is Domtar, best known for its paper, pulp and softwood products in the temperate region of Ashdown, Ark, where pockets of small landowners make their living from the wood industry.

Donna Janssen is one of those landowners. Her family property comprises 11 separate parcels spread across the region. She manages the WL Kirby Estate Partnership, named after her grandfather, a businessman who had bought tracks of land as a pastime investment and gradually developed them into a timber business. After he died, his wife took over the business, later passing it on to her daughter, who deeded it to Janssen and her family after she died.

Today, that women-run business amounts to just over 700 sprawling acres. "That is considered small," she added.

The "end game" of the farm, as Janssen puts it, is the acres of trees she grows and harvests on set intervals for whole logs. The farm also maintains revenue from the thinning of wood that is sold to the mill for pulp products like paper and pressed wood. But ultimately, she said, the large, well-cultivated and healthy stand of trees demonstrates WL Kirby Estate Partnership's sustainable forestry methods.

Janssen is a quintessential example of the American small landowner today: fiercely focused on sustainability, committed to the environment and acutely aware that sustainability isn't simply a set of practices one carries out  but a way of life that is validated by the business relationships she maintains. Domtar's own commitment to sustainability is seen not just in its effort to create a certification program, she said, but its  effort to encourage landowners to take part.

"Domtar facilitates a group certification process," that helps local farmers network and increase forest resiliency, Janssen explains. The company encouraged her to become certified after it had purchased the mill. She said Domtar's approach toward local sustainable certification is part of what makes the concept work.

"[Certification] can be a pretty daunting process," she said that would be "much more laborious. Until Domtar started talking certification, it wasn't even on my radar."

Creating that network of landowners in the Ashdown area took patient determination, said Paige Goff, Domtar's vice president of sustainability, "one dinner after another" as landowners, mill representatives and environmental advocates discussed the benefits and the means for creating an organization of certified tree farms. For many of the landowners, Goff said, sustainable management was already an assumed way of life.

Yet Domtar also realized that making decisions about their land was an intensely personal issue.

"They don't want anybody telling them how to manage it," Goff said, adding that for some, "any intrusiveness was scary to them."

Today, that coalition of tree farms is known as the Four State Timberland Owners Association. It comprises almost a million acres of timberland whose products are certified through the Forest Stewardship Council's Chain of Custody program. Janssen said it's a program that "aligns with our ethics" and helps reinforce the timberland owners' message to the public that environmental stewardship does matter. "There is an intrinsic reward in knowing that what we are doing is helping maintain the environment," Janssen said.

While the timberland owners don't get any financial incentive from certifying, she said there are educational and operational benefits from doing so.

The company assists with finding and arranging for contractors in each of the stages of timber management, from erosion control to managing evasive species, ensuring that they are trained to work in chain of custody-certified forests.

"It's a huge benefit for me as a landowner," Janssen said.

It also provides support for those special "boots on the ground" challenges that tree farm owners often face. Janssen said a classic example was couple of years ago when the area sustained an intense cold snap. Sixty percent of the trees in two different tracks were damaged.

"It was devastating," said Janssen. "That's your crop."

She said she spoke to several contractors in an effort to get an idea of what she should do. Then she called Domtar.

"The advice from Domtar was to cut down the trees and make improvements," Janssen said, explaining that the trees had been planted 18 years earlier, when they weren't certified, using planting methods that were less sustainable than those they employ today.

"It was a hard decision," Janssen said, softened only by the fact that Domtar helped the farm reclaim some of the profits by using them as pulp wood.

For Domtar, Goff said, the effort to establish sustainable resources doesn't stop at the tree farm, or its mill. The buyers who put their labels on the grocery store shelf, like P&G, help "close the loop" by demonstrating that they are willing to endorse sustainable, certified processes and promote them on their packaging.

She added however, that landowners aren't required to sell to the mill and aren't penalized if they decide to not continue on. She said the company has learned some valuable lessons over the years that they try to ensure are a regular part of their relationship with landowners. Closing the loop with suppliers is critical, but so is meaning what you say, and being willing to prove it "by creating a community where landowners can talk to landowners," Goff said.

Making the process easy so that landowners stay engaged and don't feel overwhelmed is important as well.

"We are there to help them start off a plan," said Goff, that will help build not only healthy forests but sound business partnerships in the sustainable timber industry.

https://youtu.be/31nL1fdlGmc

Flickr images: oemar; Mike Norton

Yesterday, U-Haul and supermarket supplier C&S Wholesale Grocers announced a commitment to offset their wood consumption by boosting the protection of forest-based supply chains. Both companies are working with The Conservation Fund, a non-profit that promotes conservation with an environmental and economic focus resulting in the protection of 7.8 million acres of land since 1985.

Such work by U-Haul and C&S stands out because this program requires far more effort than simply purchasing carbon offsets. Both companies’ contributions will create investments in land easements that will restore and protect native habitats. The outcome is a wide array of ecosystem services, instead of just a line item within a ledger indicating a nebulous carbon return.

The key to this program is the ongoing protection of what the Fund says is over 8,700 acres of working forests surrounding Success Pond, located in northeastern New Hampshire near the state border with Maine. In the meantime, the Fund is striving to raise funds in addition to the $3 million allocated for this project through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Forest Legacy Program.

From U-Haul’s perspective, its financial support for the Success Pond conservation program will help to offset the millions of boxes the moving and truck rental service sells to its customers annually. And for C&S, the wholesaler’s contribution can help alleviate the wood required to fabricate the thousands of wood pallets the company uses while it hauls food and other products to its client supermarkets.

This partnership is another step in the evolving relationship between the Fund and U-Haul. For a decade, the company has partnered with the conservation group to allow consumers to donate up to $10 in order to make their relocation a tad bit “greener.” According to the company, the result has been a total contribution of $4.5 million, from over 1 million customers, which fronted the costs of planting of at least 580,000 trees. To visualize this impact another way, those donations have restored over 1,600 acres of forest, equal to twice the size of Manhattan’s Central Park or more than 1,250 football fields. Other programs that have benefited from U-Haul’s support include working forest protections along California’s northern coast and urban forest plantings in Detroit and Atlanta.

What is important about these forests’ preservation is that they help protect and even generate local jobs, as such projects are often part of larger regional conservation programs. In the case of Success Pond, that conservation program is part of the larger Mahoosuc Gateway Initiative, which seeks to protect up to 30,000 acres of working forests in northern New Hampshire and long the Appalachian Trail.

The reality of U.S. forests is approximately half of them are “working” forests that are the base of the supply chain for pulp and paper companies. Threats such as climate change, along with deforestation in order to pave the way for commercial and residential development, constantly hover over many of America’s forests. The Fund’s work, in addition to partnerships between non-profits and paper companies including Kimberly-Clark and Procter & Gamble, help provide landowners an incentive to embrace more sustainable forestry measures so that these lands can be enjoyed by local residents, provide jobs and of course, sequester carbon.

Image credit: Ken Gallager/Wiki Commons

There are countless studies and reports that make the case for reduced meat consumption for a wide range of reasons. The stubborn obesity epidemic, the meat industry’s impact on climate change and the environment, as well as concerns over animal welfare all contribute to the growing interest in plant-based diets. To their credit, some meat industry leaders are striving to make the sector more sustainable; at the same time, better meat alternatives such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are gaining traction.

Nevertheless, changes in habits and behavior are also needed to encourage people to eat more vegetables and plant-based proteins, and at a minimum take an occasional break from meat. That's the best path to feeding the 9 billion people expected to live on this planet by 2050.

On that point, two recent studies suggest that boosting the consumption of meat alternatives and vegetables does not necessarily mean people must be subjected to the reciting of climate change facts, land use statistics and doomsday scenarios. In fact, subliminal messaging, or even more vibrant descriptions of food, could nudge the meat-and-potatoes crowd to explore meals without animal protein.

The first study was led by Linda Bacon, a graduate student in behavioral studies at the London School of Economics (LSE). Bacon conducted an online experiment involving the participation of 750 people who normally eat meat and fish on a regular basis. They were instructed to imagine that they were having dinner with a friend and to select a main course from a menu randomly assigned to them. All the menus included the same eight meat, fish and vegetarian options, but they all had various layouts. Three menu designs were tested against a “control” menu; all of the eight dishes were described in relatively simple terms.

The results? The diners who received menus with the plant-based dished tucked into a “vegetarian section,” typical at many restaurants, were 56 percent less likely to order those dishes. In contrast, vegetarian dishes that were described as the “Chef’s Recommendation” or touted as “fresh” or “seasonal” had almost no effect in persuading the study’s test subjects to select a plant-based dinner.

“The problem with putting some dishes into a separate vegetarian section of the menu is that it highlights the lack of meat or fish, and makes these choices look exclusive to a certain group,” explained Bacon in an interview with the World Resources Institute (WRI). “Our study’s participants may have seen this section of the menu and automatically thought it wasn’t relevant to them.”

To many vegetarians and vegans, this finding should not be surprising. Nobody likes to be treated as the “other” or “different,” nor do they want their lifestyle choices to be pigeon-holed or even seen as stigmatized. And omnivores will reply that they may not even glance at a vegetarian section of a menu. Bacon told WRI she would like to see these types of studies applied in more real-life settings, as in cafeterias or restaurants.

The other study, published this spring in JAMA Internal Medicine, concluded that vegetables on a menu may just need a linguistic makeover. Stanford University researchers studied the choices of almost 28,000 diners at a large university cafeteria. Every day during last fall’s academic quarter, at least one featured vegetable was described in one of four ways: basic, healthy restrictive, healthy positive or “indulgent.” The result was that diners were far more likely to choose the “indulgent” vegetable; in fact, they were 41 percent more inclined to make such a choice over the “healthy restrictive” option even when the dishes were exactly the same.

Forget some Americans' proclivity to use French phrases such as haricots verts or pommes frites; human nature dictates that anyone with a pulse would salivate over indulgent “dynamite chili and tangy lime-seasoned beets" over “anti-oxidant beets” or “lighter choice beets with no added sugar.” On the other hand, who would not be tantalized by terms such as “caramelized,” “twisted,” “twice-cooked” or “zesty” . . . as those beat out “low-sodium,” “cholesterol free” or “wholesome.” The former options make one’s fingers twitchy to send a Snap or make an Instagram post, while the latter choices imply the diner is a step or shuffle away from moving into an assisted living facility.

Both the LSE and Stanford studies build upon the obvious: we know that vegetables are good for us, but a little branding or a few psychological can convince more of us that healthy eating can be decadent, not dull and depriving. In the meantime, the planet, and public health, could both benefit.

Image credit: Kelly Sue DeConnick/Flickr

Now that the Paris Agreement on climate change is in force, the pace of global investment in renewables is expected to ramp up. One factor that could help accelerate the trend is the emergence of new hydrogen production technology, in which solar, wind or other renewables are deployed to "split" water for fuel cell electric vehicles and energy storage.

Although President Trump has announced that the U.S. will join Syria and Nicaragua as the only three nations failing to join the Paris Agreement, the U.S. Department of Energy is still promoting renewables with great consistency. In the latest development, the agency has just announced a round of $15.8 in funding aimed at speeding up the entry of renewable hydrogen and fuel cell EVs into the mass market.

$15.8 million for new hydrogen technology

Fuel cell EV technology is beginning to take hold in the logistics and trucking sectors, but it is in need of some serious innovative breakthroughs in order to capture the hearts and minds of the motoring public.

The limited availability of hydrogen fueling stations is a significant but resolvable obstacle. A much more thorny issue is cost. Fuel cell EVs are still relatively expensive compared to their battery EV cousins, and they are far more costly than a typical gasoline-powered car.

The new round of funding focuses $15.8 million on 30 projects that will help bring down the cost of fuel cell light-duty vehicles. That includes the splashily colored passenger cars favored by businesses seeking a contemporary image.

Fuel cells produce electricity through a reaction between hydrogen and oxygen. The reaction requires a catalyst, and the current catalyst of choice is made with platinum and related metals. The high cost of platinum is one main factor keeping the cost of fuel cell EVs high, so four projects in the new round of funding are aimed at developing new low-cost catalysts that meet or beat platinum on efficiency.

Another group of four projects is aimed at developing new nano-engineered materials for onboard hydrogen storage. Currently, the typical fuel cell EV uses hydrogen as a gas stored under pressure in a tank or canister. The specialized materials needed for pressurized storage are expensive, so subbing in a cheaper solution will also help bring down the cost of fuel cell EVs.

A third group involves three projects that will come at the storage issue from another angle. The idea is to develop new carbon fiber materials that will slice the cost of hydrogen storage tanks approximately in half.

Let's hear it for renewable hydrogen

By far the largest group in the new round -- 19 in all -- goes to advanced technologies for producing hydrogen from water.

One main focus will be on electrolysis, in which an electrical current is applied to "split" water. The electricity could come from practically any renewable source.

Another area of interest is photoelectrochemical water splitting. This technology involves dipping a solar cell directly into water to produce an electrical current.

One interesting aspect of photoelectrochemical technology is the potential for affordable, small scale production in off grid communities.

These two areas of research are relatively advanced. The new round of funding pushes the envelope even further with a third pathway, thermochemical water splitting.

The thermochemical field deploys high heat from concentrating solar power plants to jumpstart a series of chemical reactions. The chemicals are recycled in a closed loop, so the system only consumes water, not additional chemicals.

Waste heat from nuclear reactors is also under consideration as a heat source for thermochemical water splitting.

Toward a sustainable fuel cell EV

The renewables angle is absolutely critical for the development of a sustainable fuel cell EV market, because the main source of hydrogen at the present time is natural gas.

So, it's encouraging to see the U.S. Department of Energy continue to pump dollars into advanced R&D that promotes sustainable hydrogen.

The agency's effort is particularly noteworthy because it undercuts the promotion of natural gas as a climate change solution by ExxonMobil and other powerful natural gas stakeholders. That message gained additional leverage in the Trump Administration when former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson was tapped for Secretary of State.

The new round of funding also serves to demonstrate the value of the country's national laboratory network.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry has become a vociferous champion of the national labs and of their work on sustainable energy, and the press release for the new round of funding emphasizes that the $15.8 million builds on the existing research network.

The 30 projects come under the Energy Materials Network, a group of national laboratory consortia organized last year during the Obama Administration.

The catalyst projects will leverage resources from the Electrocatalysis Consorium, the nanomaterials group falls within the Hydrogen Materials—Advanced Research Consortium, and the carbon fiber group will combine resources from the Energy Department's Vehicle Technologies Office and Advanced Manufacturing Office.

The water splitting projects come under the HydroGEN Consortium, which includes Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Idaho National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Savannah River National Laboratory.

The continued flow of research dollars is good news for companies looking for new ways to decarbonize and highlight their climate action steps.

In addition to using fuel cell vehicles as promotional tools, companies can look forward to installing a sleek, modular water splitting system and hydrogen fuel dispenser on site.

The system is currently under development by a private sector consortium called SimpleFuel with support from the Department of Energy and it is on a pathway to commercial development so stay tuned for that.

Photo: via U.S. Department of Energy.

By: David Ehrenberg

Here’s something that should send a shiver down your spine. Water — that little thing that comprises 71 percent of the Earth and as much as 60 percent of the adult body — is seen as a scarce resource everywhere, not just in underdeveloped countries.

But the water business is also a cash cow that grosses nearly $600 billion annually servicing the agricultural, sustainability, and socio-economic sectors, among others. The increasing cost of clean water is becoming a greater source of contention between public and private entities and between the haves and have-nots.

While water tech companies exist to solve problems in agriculture, third-world country development, and sustainability, they themselves have interesting ethical dilemmas to navigate, namely this: How can we get clean water to everyone who needs it, rather than just those who can afford it?

Former Nestle CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe once said water isn’t a basic human right but a commodity that should be privatized and controlled. That opinion gains an added wrinkle when considering that Brabeck-Letmathe’s former employer gets a sweet discount pumping water out of western Michigan while the city of Flint, a couple of hours away, suffers a well-documented water contamination crisis.

But the former executive’s assertion also presents a sizable ethical conundrum: Should water be available to only the people who can afford it, and should that logic apply to other life-essential resources?

That’s a biggie of a problem for water tech companies, but it’s not the only challenge they’re up against. Water tech startups in Silicon Valley straddle the line between universal, affordable water and making water available to those who can afford it. These companies must reconcile profiteering from a public resource with the need for efficient and affordable delivery systems.

Plus, if water tech companies can balance growth targets with societal targets, who has access to the technology first? In most cases, those who need water technology the most are the least able to afford it. How long must they wait in line behind “paying customers” before their needs are addressed?

The ethical issues facing the water technology industry have the potential to deepen the economic wedge in society. But water tech startups also have the potential to balance the needs of consumers and money-making entities by working through the social issues. If technology is leveraged responsibly, water cleanliness’s future could be rosier than the doomsday proponents would have us believe. Here are a few routes to that destination:

1. Invest in social equity. It is possible for profit-making enterprises to advance societal good. For founders, the challenge is twofold: making the societal component work within the business model and finding investors willing to include it in their portfolios.

   The Victorian Desalination Project in Melbourne, Australia, supplies up to 150 billion liters of clean drinking water annually from a seawater desalination plant completed in 2012. A noble partnership between the Australian government and the private company AquaSure, the $3.5 billion project suffers from high running costs. This leaves the plant largely idle, an extravagance beyond the reach of poorer nations.

   But the future is looking bright both for the water tech industry and those who need clean water. The price of water is expected to increase, and technology could make desalination highly profitable and affordable water more accessible as the price shifts.



2. Get the community involved. Water is a concern for both public and private entities. Partnerships between tech startups and local governments to scale innovations can alleviate the need for rapid growth through private spending.

   In California, agriculture uses 80 percent of the state’s water; in this arid land, tech startups such as Puresense and AquaSpy have wasted little time developing sensors and software to improve irrigation. The return on these investments has underwhelmed because the technology hasn’t gained traction in the agricultural arena, showing there’s still work to do.



3. Invest in needy areas. Water tech companies can stimulate investment in the neediest parts of the world, where jobs and infrastructure can do more for populations than any “one for one” model such as TOMS shoe initiative.

   ImagineH2O runs an accelerator that focuses solely on water tech. Since 2009, the group has worked with more than 650 startups in over 30 countries to create partnerships among utilities, corporations, investors, academic institutions, and associations.

   So water tech companies have plenty of directions to take, such as targeting areas most affected by climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that “for each degree of global warming, approximately 7 percent of the global population is projected to be exposed to a decrease of renewable water resources of at least 20 percent.”

The water tech industry isn’t just facing an unfathomable opportunity to pursue equitable water access and services; it faces an ethical imperative to do so. Though it’s increasingly scarce, water is a resource tech startups are invested in improving for everyone who needs it.

The newswires have aligned with the company’s description as “taking leave” and an eventual “diminished” role, but for all intents and purposes, Travis Kalanick is out as CEO of Uber. In an email to company employees, Kalanick announced he would take an indefinite leave, and the company decided to strip many of the founder-CEO’s responsibilities in the event he does return.

Kalanick’s decision to step aside caps several months of chaos at the company, during which the public’s perception of Uber cratered after scandals constantly distracted the company. Many of Uber’s top leadership have left Uber, and Kalanick struggled to replace several of the company’s most critical executive positions.

Once seen as having a transformational role in changing transportation in America’s cities, while freeing up citizens from the costs and burdens of car ownership, Uber instead became a caricature of the “bro culture” critics say still festers throughout much of Corporate America, especially in Silicon Valley.

Kalanick’s email capped off several days of a very public and agonizing discussion over whether he would stay or go. In fairness, he did lose his mother, who died recently in a boating accident in Fresno County’s Sierra Nevada foothills; his father is still in intensive care, and Kalanick reportedly has spent much time at his bedside. But the indecision sharpened criticism of Kalanick as many analysts charged that his wavering contributed even more to the instability at Uber.

“This bizarre Hamlet act — let’s be clear here that any other CEO, except in the founder-worshipping culture of Silicon Valley, would have been fired at this point — is causing intense turmoil among his top execs,” wrote Kara Swisher of the technology news site Recode only moments before Kalanick’s email went public.

Before and after Kalanick’s exit, many observers of Uber insisted that the company’s recent struggles were linked directly to its CEO. Long before the company’s most recent missteps, Uber became the symbol to many workers about what went awry with both the sharing economy, which has largely morphed into the “gig economy.” Last year, the company refused to take on additional safety measures after incidents in cities such as Kalamazoo, Michigan; Uber’s perceived thumbing of its nose at local communities and leaders eventually led the company be kicked out of cities including Austin, Texas.

Yet the company still roared along, dabbling in subprime auto loans for drivers who depend on Uber for their sole source of income. And it its drive for supremacy, Uber even lowered its rates in cities from San Francisco to New York in order to secure its stranglehold on local transportation systems. Many of these scandals could be traced to Kalanick, and he was often the one to tout the company’s controversial tactics.

The controversy certainly did not dissuade venture capitalists from Silicon Valley and beyond, who poured money into the Uber at such an astonishing rate that it rivaled global leaders Alibaba and Facebook in the total amount of funds companies have received in recent years. At one point, Uber became king of the Silicon Valley “unicorns” with its $70 billion valuation, though some analysts have said the realities of a ridesharing company’s business model limits its value at less than half that amount.

But even while Uber remained the darling of both Wall Street and Bay Area tech titans, the news only became worse for Uber, and Kalanick was at the center of the storm.

First came Kalanick’s decision to join a Trump Administration advisory board. That did not mean he was politically aligned with the new president, but it proved to become bad optics. Uber then stumbled badly in January during the first Trump travel ban firestorm, which drowned out Kalanick’s pledge to financially support any Uber drivers caught in the chaos.

Then came the mounting charges of a work culture rampant with sexual harassment, summed up in excruciating detail by Susan Fowler, a former Uber engineer. More accounts of similar behavior went public, and former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder led an investigation that resulted this week in a list of recommendations in an attempted overhaul of what smacked as a  fraternity boy culture.

While the company grappled with public perception of a boys’ club run amok, Uber’s strategic decisions landed it in even more hot water. Uber’s agreement to buy a seven-month-old start-up company, Otto, for $680 million turned some heads while causing many analysts to scratch theirs. But the acquisition then made sense after Google filed a lawsuit alleging that Otto’s founder had stolen the ride sharing technology of that tech giant’s autonomous driving division, Waymo.

Uber has been focusing on self-driving cars for its long-term viability, as Kalanick believed that such technology investments comprised  the only option in a world where automation keeps accelerating.

The risk for Uber, however was that it kept bleeding money, with no cauterizing on the horizon before it could eventually revamp its business model. The privately-held company reportedly lost almost $3 billion last year. As of last month, those numbers were “improving,” according to CNBC – the company pulled in $3.4 billion in revenues, but still lost $708 million. But that so-called boost came just as another Uber executive, head of finance Gautam Gupta, announced he was leaving the firm.

Meanwhile, Kalanick continued to personify Uber, but in an unflattering way. He was eviscerated on social media after he was videotaped berating an Uber driver who complained about Uber’s low, lowered and still lowered rates. Most recently, Uber’s insistence that it embarked on a course correction to get rid of its toxic man-boy culture looked hallow when it turned out the company was accused of using a woman’s confidential medical records to contradict her claims that she was raped by an Uber driver in India. Once again, this latest public relations fiasco appeared to have Kalanick’s fingerprints all over it.

If these shenanigans under his watch at a GE, GM or IBM, Kalanick would have been ousted long ago. But Uber’s weak corporate governance structure ensured Kalanick had disproportionate control. Kalanick allegedly has stacked Uber’s board with his allies; Ariana Huffington was recently added to the board, but she reportedly had little power, if any at all. Kalanick and his supporters can run the show because of the special class of shares they own.

Nevertheless, it became clear that investors have had enough. On Sunday, Uber’s board approved Holder’s recommendations. Whether the company can really emerge as a responsible corporate citizen is in doubt; Bloomberg has described many of the firm’s new commitments as “symbolic.”

Meanwhile, Uber’s main competitor, Lyft, now has a 25 percent market share, up from 18 percent from the beginning of this year, largely in part because Uber’s reputation has become toxic. If there is one hashtag that has worked over the years, it would be #DeleteUber.

In the end, while Kalanick may be technically on “leave,” the company would ignite a death wish if they welcomed him back with any measure of visibility and clout. Uber can only become relevant and trusted again if it severs ties with Kalanick; and if the company’s shareholders and board cannot accomplish that feat, public pressure, along with market forces, certainly will.

Image credit: JD Lasica/Flickr