Bloomberg’s homepage is pretty much what you would expect from the world’s leading financial information firm: the market snapshot…a crawl of all the major indices, and of course the Dow, S&P, and NASDAQ at a glance.  Below the logo, the navigation bar shows all the things relevant to the world of finance: News, Markets, Personal Finance, Sustainability…

Holy cow! “Sustainability”!? Last week, Bloomberg quietly offered up prime online real estate for this critical category. So far, it’s proving to be a fantastic source of national and international environmental news (I used it last week to track the depressing climate treaty discussions). But that’s the smaller point.

The big news here is the message Bloomberg is telling the finance industry: today’s businesses need to understand and track sustainability. One interesting question—is Bloomberg responding to a need voiced by the industry, or are they trying to make a market for it? Hopefully it’s a little of both.

One of the great benefits of climate change is the opening of the Arctic, making available vast new supplies of fossil fuel, most recently highlighted by a substantial mutual exploitation agreement between Russia and Exxon.

Seriously, of course this is awful.  It won’t even lower the cost of fossil fuels significantly because it will be such a small slice of global oil production, and even that slice will take years to serve.   More importantly, when (not if) some pipe cracks open under the ice in the middle of the four-month night, they (whether Exxon, Rosneft, Shell, BP, or whoever) will be totally helpless. Well, I mean the crews on the rig will be helpless. The lads and lassies back at corporate HQ will be doing the usual bang-up job of manufacturing reasons why no one could possibly have seen this coming.

The U.S. should at least try to stop this.  Unfortunately, we don’t have much influence over either Russia or Exxon, and one major reason is that we have no serious national program for reducing fossil fuel use ourselves. We really can’t castigate Putin for their arctic adventures when we recently approved Shell poking a few 4,000-foot holes into the seabed off Alaska’s north slope), and all signs point to our imminent (and tragic) approval of the Keystone XL pipeline to bring very heavy oil from Canadian tar sands to Houston refineries.

If you haven’t noticed (which would be reasonable, considering the scant attention it’s paid in the mainstream media), the Keystone XL pipeline is the reason our foremost climate scientist James Hansen, agitator Bill McKibben, and activist celebrities like Darryl Hannah have been getting arrested in front of the White House. The White House?  Aren’t the good guys in charge? Why aren’t these demonstrators over at the House of Representatives, protesting climate change deniers?  Well, because we seem to have moved from an administration that denied climate change and let oil companies do whatever they wanted to an administration that supports climate science and lets oil companies do whatever they want.

There are two likely explanations for the administration’s lack of resistance to these potentially catastrophic developments.  First, the price of gasoline is heading toward $4/gallon, and anyone opposed to drilling and pipelines is attacked on that basis (no matter that neither arctic drilling nor the tar sands will have any real impact on gas prices.)

Second, in the middle of a deep recession and with staggeringly high unemployment across the country, politicians may have finally realized that voters want them to do something about jobs. Unfortunately, Keystone XL has a well-oiled publicity machine bragging about the 20,000 jobs they say they will “create.”

This analysis is wrong. Simple arithmetic shows that energy efficiency programs aimed at reducing our need for fossil fuels will create more jobs than any pipeline, since the money that will go to Canada to pay for the oil would instead stay within the country and go to workers in weatherization programs, wind turbine factories, or electric car development efforts. This arithmetic was developed by Democratic Party policy wonks over decades, but their understanding seems to no longer be operative.

If this foolishness continues, arctic seals will soon find it much easier to see the oil-soaked polar bears trying to sneak up on them.  On all other fronts, these projects are bad news in both the short and long term.  Oil spills will darken the Arctic, or even Montana, and the ongoing increases in greenhouse gas emissions will ensure that the ice and the food chains we all (seals, polar bears and humans) rely on for our survival will soon be irrevocably altered or gone.

Photo credits: [Keystone Pipeline] U.S. Dept. of State |  [Tar Sands Protesters] Ben Powless / tarsandsaction.org

Like me, you’ve probably heard the sentiment that however much progress we’ve made on sustainability we are still way behind Europe; much of what we consider advanced is just standard practice over there.

For example, there’s an EU-wide mandate for new buildings to be net zero by 2021. The UK has mandated an 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. Many of Europe’s building codes are far stricter than our own…and so on.

Virtually all one hears on this subject is anecdotal, or so general that it’s not useful.  Here at Urban Green Council we’ve been asking ourselves for some time how much what we “know” about Europe’s building industry is accurate and what lessons there are for own industry.  Are the progressive measures similar across Europe?  Do they have programs on par with the Greener, Greater Buildings Plan? How do our best buildings (both new and existing) compare with those in Europe? What about the rest of the world, like Canada and Asia? And how much of the differences between these regions are driven by market characteristics like energy prices?

Our September conference, Global Lessons in Green Building: How NYC Stacks Up, will address these questions through two high profile panels.  One will focus on policy and codes, the other on market and finance forces.  We’ve developed the conference hand-in-hand with our partner, ULI New York, and are looking forward to the closing remarks from Clay Nesler of Johnson Controls. It’s our hope that learning about green building in the rest of the world will give us a better understanding of initiatives at home and expand our sense of what’s possible.

Please join us September 19^th.  A cocktail reception will follow the proceedings.

RELATED READING:
Greening the Concrete Jungle (The Economist 9.3.11): America’s cities are confronting climate change. They are also saving money.
Germany Sets Renewable Records (Grist.org 8.31.11): In the first half of 2011, renewables accounted for fully 20.8% of power production.
In Seattle, Work Starts on “Greenest” Office Building (L.A. Times 8.29.11): 1st big office building designed to carry its own environmental weight being built in Seattle, 1 of 12 “living buildings.”
Is This the World’s Greenest Neighborhood? (NRDC: Switchboard 8.24.11): Dockside Green in Victoria, BC was the first applicant for LEED for Neighborhood Development.
Western Grid 2050 (NRDC Switchboard 8.24.11): Provides a Clean Energy Vision & Roadmap for the West’s Economy and Environment

Weather is what’s happening in the air around us, and climate is how it is, long term, where we are. At least, that’s what we used to mean, back when a location came with a climate: temperate, tropical, sunny, or moist.  Seasonal variations were part of the idea of climate – summer, winter, monsoon, mistral – but there was little room for other change within the concept.  On the other hand, the weather changes constantly, giving us a way to make conversation in elevators with total strangers or romantic rivals.

At the end of the nineteenth century,  Arhennius pointed out that man-made variations in the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere could alter the earth’s temperature, and the science of climate change was born.  A fringe activity until around 1990, it now attracts most of the attention of atmospheric scientists, since it is well established that if we continue our wasteful ways we will irretrievably alter the earth’s climate, and not in a good way.

But all this talk of climate change is about long term statistical quantities, like average temperature, area of minimum arctic sea ice, fraction of coral reefs bleached past recovery, or the range of altitudes over which the edelweiss can flower.  Ask a climate scientist about the severity of the rainstorm last Sunday night and she will suggest that you talk to a weather analyst, since no individual weather event can be directly tied to the slow process of climate change.

Well, for any individual event, that’s probably true.  But have you been following the news lately?  Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, has, and in an astonishing op-ed piece published in the Washington Post he implicitly challenges climate scientists to deal not with individual weather events, but with the extraordinary series of floods, tornadoes, and everything but a rain of frogs that have been devastating one locality after another.  I won’t tell you his conclusion because everyone should read the entire piece for themselves. Less time than you’ve already put in, guaranteed!

Photo credit: NASA

With the first annual deadline for New York City’s new benchmarking law rapidly approaching, I’ve been wondering how our efforts compare with similar efforts around the US and Europe.  How does Germany, so far ahead of the U.S. in virtually every green building category, track and rate the energy efficiency of their buildings?  Fortunately, the folks at the Institute for Market Transformation and the Natural Resources Defense Council have teamed up to create a robust website dedicated to collecting information on energy efficiency rating efforts worldwide: BuildingRating.org.

The website currently has two fundamental offerings, a “Policy Map” that allows you to peruse very basic information about rating efforts country by country through a world map, shown below, and a “Document Library” which is a collection of research papers and studies about energy efficiency rating, sorted by country.

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Credit: Mark McCormick and Paul Scruton, The Guardian

The Guardian has produced the beautiful graphic you see here showing CO2 emissions by country.  According to the Guardian the big story here is that China now produces more CO2 than the US and Canada combined, and that India is now #3 on this list.  But don’t be despondent, we still crush China in the category that matters, CO2 emissions per capita.  As you can see in the graphic below, each American proudly pumps 18 tons (or tonnes, to the Guardian) of CO2 into our precious atmosphere every year.  China can only manage a measly 6 tons per year per person and India only a pathetic 3+.  Note: the graphic above uses 2009 data, and the below is based on 2007 data.

Credit: Stanford Kay Studio.com

To follow up with my post from last week, the COP 16 Meeting of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded last weekend without any binding deal on emissions reduction, as many had predicted. They did, however, produce an agreement sufficient to allow them to announce that the process was not dead, and in doing so, included two potentially valuable steps forward.

All countries will now have to present inventories of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, developed countries annually and developing countries biennially. Although they will not have to file their data on the EPA’s Portfolio Manager web site (where it would not fit), the transparency this will promote concerning emissions mirrors that we expect for building energy consumption from the New York City Benchmarking rule (Local Law 84 of ‘09).

Further, each country must also submit reports on mitigation actions and projected emission reductions that sound remarkably like the audits required by New York Local Law 87 of ‘09. Countries are not required to take action, but must report on the actions they take or will take and estimate the savings. New York City buildings must report on actions they could take and estimate the associated savings.

All this and not a word of credit for our fair city!

In another item in the Agreement, the governments and nonprofit organizations who dominated the meeting agreed on the necessity of funding to help developing countries mitigate climate change and also adapt to it, to the tune of $30 billion from 2010 to 2012 and $100 billion by 2020. In subsequent discussions with reporters, the parties indicated that the funding would largely come from the private sector.

Found relaxing in a Cancun bar after two weeks of hard work, the Private Sector said it was unaware of any commitment, but expressed confidence that progress would be made next year in Durban, South Africa.

Over at Hans Rosling’s incredible site, gapminder.org, you can view an animated time line of CO2 emissions by country, from 1820 to 2006.  One of the funner moments is watching the countries bubble up onto the graph in the 1800′s when only a few countries had any CO2 emissions at all.  As you can see in the above image the X data is average wealth per person, Y data is CO2 emissions per person.  Yes- the United States is the giant yellow blob on the upper right, proudly besting most every competitor for most profligate with fossil fuels.  (Tiny orange blob above and right of the US?  Luxembourg, go figure.)  To me the interesting comparisons are with places like France, orange dot right at the crosshairs of 4 tonnes and $30K.  Similar wealth to the US, but with remarkably lower CO2 emissions.  This is largely due to two factors, they generate a huge percentage of their electricity with nukes, and they mostly live in dense towns and cities where public transportation is the most viable way to move around.  Food for thought, no?

Rosling’s The Joy of Stats program will be aired later this month in the UK, fingers crossed it comes to BBC America. His now famous TED talk is here.

Royal palaces in the UK to receive green upgrades.  Even the Queen sees the value of saving money through energy conservation . . .

The New York Times has a ton of stuff on green issues today, from the sublime to the ridiculous.  There’s an Op-Ed on Climate Change by Mikhail Gorbachev and an article about Greenpeace targeting Facebook for their reliance on coal plants to power their data centers.

Greenpeace started its campaign in February, urging “ The So Coal Network” — a play on Facebook’s “social network” identity — to “Unfriend Coal,” which it calls “the dirtiest source of energy and largest single source of pollution in the world.”

Following on the data center issue there’s a great piece on European Union efforts to significantly increase the energy efficiency of their data centers. Seriously- the Europeans are cleaning our clocks on this stuff- they are way out in front of us.  While the EU works on advancing energy conservation where it counts we have to beat back attempts to eliminate one of the only clean energy laws in the US.  The Times has a nice editorial on the resounding defeat of the efforts in California to kill their enormously successful Climate Change law.

All of this is book-ended by a style-type piece on upcycling and the growing culture of seeing waste materials as a resource rather than a nuisance to be disposed out of sight, and a business section item on the many bond funds out there working to finance clean energy investments.  This last piece has a lot of great stuff on progressive bond funds but makes one of the most common and most unbelievably frustrating mistakes about the economics of climate change.  They open the piece with:

Financial experts may debate how much it would cost to shift the world to a low carbon economy, but they agree on one thing: the amount would be phenomenal.

It’s a snappy way to start but totally ignores the issue at hand, namely, our options.  Shifting to a low carbon economy might entail spending significant sums of money but it will not be “expensive” when compared to the other options.  As Amory Lovins has pointed out, “The good news about climate change is that it’s cheaper to fix than it is to ignore.”  Yes- reorienting our infrastructure to clean and green energy sources will cost money, but the repercussions of just burning all the fossil fuel the planet has to offer as quickly as possible will cost even more.  This is simple math, folks.