Green Wombat

Enviro Capitalism: Water Quality Markets

Attention Wall Street types and financial entrepreneurs keen to go green. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture today announced they're hooking up to promote water quality trading markets.

The idea is to clean up rivers, lakes and oceans by letting those who restore wetlands and reduce agricultural runoff to sell credits to sewage treatment plants and other facilities required to maintain water quality levels under the federal Clean Water Act. In other words, if Big City Sewage Plant can't or won't meet its water quality targets it can buy credits from Farmer Brown who has gone organic and thus slashed the amount of contaminants running from her land into a nearby river. Pollutants such as nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment can be traded.

Here's the green to be made: while there are a few scattered water quality trading markets around, there's a business to be built in setting up and brokering these markets. That means opportunities for consultants, traders and software engineers. The feds hope to provide $3 million in funding for such markets in 2007.

More Companies Go Kyoto

Thirteen U.S. corporations today pledged to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions between 9 percent and 100 percent over the next decade. The companies, which range from Fortune 100 behemoths like DuPont and Intel to the Sonoma Wine Company, signed up for the Bush administration's voluntary global warming program called Climate Leaders. (The complete list is here.) So far 58 companies have taken the pledge, and to date five companies, including General Motors and IBM, have met their greenhouse gas reduction targets.

Participating companies agree to conduct an inventory of their greenhouse gas emissions and then develop a plan to reduce or offset them. Some smaller companies have gone completely carbon neutral. For instance, Silver Spring, Maryland, printing company Ecoprint reduced its emissions to zero by buying its electricity from a wind farm and purchasing renewable energy credits to offset emissions from employee commutes, manufacturing and heating. Conservation Services Group, a 270-person Westborough, Massachusetts energy consultancy, promised to slash its annual 2,036 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions to zip by replacing its vehicle fleet with hybrids, curtailing electricity use and buying credits from the Chicago Climate Exchange, a carbon trading market.

AutoNation Plugs In

The green bandwagon rolls on. Today, AutoNation, the largest car retailer in the U.S., called on Detroit and Tokyo to start rolling plug-in hybrids off the assembly line.

"These new hybrids would offer consumers a 50-mile all-electric range, get the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon, be fully recharged at night and deliver all the performance and comfort of traditional gasoline-powered vehicles without the damaging emissions," said AutoNation chief executive Mike Jackson in a statement. "We believe Americans will buy these vehicles, which is why we want to sell them."

AutoNation signed on to the Plug-In Partners campaign, a group of enviro activists, cities, companies and utilities trying to create a national market for plug-in hybrids. To create a plug-in Prius, for instance, you swap out the car's battery for a rechargable lithium ion version.

The car retailer's move is good news for the campaign but problematic for startups like EDrive and Hymotion - see Business 2.0's July article - that sell plug-in conversion kits. If automakers heed the call for hyper-efficient hybrids, the conversion kit market is sure to run out of gas.

Silicon Valley's Green Politics

With the election a few weeks away, a Who's Who of Silicon Valley's executive class is convening a "CEO Summit on Alternative Energy" Monday in San Jose. The confab is part of a campaign by a group called Silicon Valley Business Leaders for Alternative Energy to lobby Congress to reduce the United States' dependence on imported oil.

Here's what the group wants: federal incentives - read subsidies - to companies developing renewable energy technologies; policies to shield alt energy businesses from oil price flucations of the type that doomed the solar biz in the 1980s; promotion of flex-fuel cars capable of running on both gasoline and ethanol; and policies to encourage the development of plug-in flex-fuel hybrid electric cars and "practical" all-electric cars.

So far about 30 Silicon Valley CEOs - including the chiefs of Advanced Micro Devices, Juniper Networks, Palm and SanDisk - have signed the group's open letter calling for such an agenda. Of course it goes without saying that Silicon Valley is experiencing a green energy boom, with big investments in biofuels and solar power on the line. Fair enough, given that Big Oil has certainly played the politics-and-tax-break game to its multibillion-dollar advantage for well high on a century.

Monday's event at Novellus Systems will feature about 200 execs, academics, policy wonks and politicos like California Senator Dianne Feinstein.

As Goes Berkeley, So Goes the Nation?

Part of the fun of living in Berkeley, California, is voting. Sure, there's the usual bond measures and city council candidates - spanning the political spectrum from the left to the far left to the far out left. But in Berkeley we also like to weigh in on topics of international import, and the 2006 election is no exception. For instance, the November 7 ballot features Measure H, which calls on the city council to petition the U.S. House of of Representatives to impeach President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for various high crimes and misdemeanors. Then there's Measure G, which would have Berkeley reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050. The measure, which is advisory but backed by the mayor, urges the city council to set a 10-year emissions reduction target in 2007 and develop a plan to achieve that goal.

Now on many issues Berkeley tends to serve as a bellwether only for Santa Cruz, Santa Monica, Eugene, Boulder and other people's republics. But on the environment the East Bay city has been a national leader: It was the first to adopt curbside recycling, now found in even the reddest of the red states, and in 2003 it began to convert all municipal vehicles to biodiesel.

In one of its periodic forays into foreign policy, Berkeley endorsed the Kyoto Protocol and then proceeded to make its rhetoric reality. Between 2002 and 2005 the city exceeded the Kyoto targets by reducing its greenhouse emissions 14 percent. The city also has joined the Chicago Climate Exchange, the North American carbon trading market. So as New York City and other municipalities now move to limit their own greenhouse gas emissions, they just might want to look to the left coast.