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Interface CEO Ray Anderson attended the CleanTech Investor Summit last week in Palm Springs, California. That's a good sign for innovative young companies like Climate Earth -- his presence is a signal that investors must participate in creating markets for green products.
Anderson is a legend for rethinking business as usual. He made flooring manufacturer Interface an industry leader by investing in green technologies and using sustainability as a key performance indicator.
His vision continues to drive profitability and market leadership for the company. At the GreenBuild conference and trade show in November, Interface's booth featured an enormous pachyderm hanging from the ceiling above pillars of fossil fuel -- the proverbial elephant in the room. It wasn't just clever marketing.
According to an Interface representative at the show, the company has extracted so much fossil fuel from its supply chain that it was buffered from fluctuations in oil prices last year.
While competitors had to raise prices, Interface proudly told customers about their efficiency and had no cost increases to pass along. Talk about a competitive advantage.
The Associated Press reported Tuesday that oil prices rose to a 15-month high in January as a result of cold and snowy conditions. Now, prices are being impacted as much by China's bank lending practices as domestic supply and demand.
Weather and foreign economic policies are only two of an infinite number of factors that affect oil availability and price. This unpredictability presents a threat to profits, especially for companies dependent upon low-margin products and carbon-intensive materials.
CEOs looking for new ways to cut costs should focus on reducing their company's supply chain dependence on oil. The first step is to understand their current fossil fuel exposure.
Climate
"This is not your father's carbon accounting"
What a strange thing to say. When I was growing up, my father believed the hype of the day that we were going into a new ice age. Global warming was never the problem until after 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl when we quit building nuclear power plants. So I don't know anybody's fathers who practiced carbon accounting.
I think the elephant in the room is the carbon footprint of the work required to pay interest on the United States national debt. The elephant in the room is the carbon footprint of the work required to repay the national debt in full. When does the carbon footprint of the national debt grow to overshadow all reductions we were promised to see when we borrowed money to build a green economy?
Now THAT would be my father's carbon accounting!
Try looking at the real elephant and you will see that it no longer matters what America's biggest coal power plant does. All this efforts to change the lives of individuals by using poisonous mercury light bulbs, public transportation, no more toilet paper etc. is the smallest imperceptible sliver when sized against the US government spending.
Why does the focus of the green movement never look at the carbon footprint of the national debt? I think it is because deep inside everybody knows it is not really true that cabon has anything to do with climate change.
Does Climate Earth calculate
Does Climate Earth calculate any carbon accounting for when a company accepts federal grants?
Does Climate Earth accept federal grants?
It seems possible that a company that accepts government subsidies could possibly be pushing a portion of their carbon footprint to an entity that doesn't get measured. It looks like a shell game.
For example, you wouldn't think AIG has a big carbon footprint. But when you consider what must be done to repay the national bailout expense, there must be a carbon footprint for all those billions of dollars they took.
It would be a ground breaking revolution if Climate Earth calculated the carbon footprint of every dollar of US national debt. I think nobody ever did that before.
Get back under your bridge
This article is about how carbon accounting can both keep your footprint small and save your business money by buffering one's bottom line from the vicissitudes of swings in carbon fuel costs. Any troll using concern about the national debt to question the value of making business less polluting, less resource-intensive, less costly and more profitable is in the wrong place. Want to take swipes at climate change? There are blogs for that; this isn't one of them.
Never was a swipe made at
Never was a swipe made at making businesses less poluting or making them less resource-intensive or making them less costly or making them more profitable. Those are your words, not mine at all. I'm not making a swipe at climate change, as the concensus shows that the climate has been changing ever since the planet was born. Changing is what the climate does. So where did these words you put into my mouth come from? Not unlike everything else from you guys, this is a breathless and hysterical overreaction.
"Green" has no domain over those business concepts. Those practices are older than the internet that Al Gore invented.
So, this green website and this article about carbon accounting isn't the place where a reader would be welcome to wonder the carbon footprint of the national debt? Thanks for this information, but somehow I knew before I asked the question would be highly offensive to this crowd. That kind of carbon accounting would be too hard for you guys. Or it may lead to the conclusion that we can save the planet by repaying the money we borrowed instead of borrowing more like you want us to.
The introduction of the concept of "carbon accounting" and selling it as if anybody's dad would be familiar creates an impression and it is unspokenly implied that carbon accounting has the same credibility earned by thousands of years of financial accounting. Clearly, that associative assumption must be wrong if the tiniest challenging question sets off such a defensive mechanism of open hostility from you.
So your rules are that your ideas can't be challenged. That's because you can't defend against a challenge.
... as if the national debt has no effect on business. Get real.
If the national debt has no carbon footprint, then could we not go green and satisfy carbon accounting by borrowing every single dollar we spend? Problem solved! Yay!
I'm pretty sure blog comments are considered to be written by "trolls" when the comment poster hides behind the identification "Anonymous." I think you are the troll.
Here's an example
Here's an example scenario.
Company Alpha and Company Beta use identical resources. They both have the same number of workers who all live in the same apartment complex and drive identical cars to work the exactsame hours of the exact same day. Company Alpha and Company Beta perform the exact same experiments to achieve the exact same research discovery of the exact same alternative technology. Both companies will reach the same discovery at the same time.
Company Alpha runs on research grants from the US DOE.
Company Beta has another division that doesn't exist at Alpha. Beta has more employees and uses more resources. Beta funds it's own research with an additional profitable manufacturing plant. The additional manufacturing plant makes sure that Beta's research funding perfectly matches Alpha's research funding.
When both companies are compared to eachother after carbon accounting, Alpha is greener than Beta. Alpha does no work to be funded, but Beta works and that work has a carbon footprint.
So Beta MUST SHUT DOWN manufacturing and lay off workers and ask the government for grants so Beta can be as green as Alpha is green.
Now, imagine the exact same discovery is made at the exact same time in both companies...
Beta and Alpha cannot start manufacturing the new alternative technology because all work has a carbon footprint. Working hurts Alpha and Beta's carbon accounting. Carbon accounting is a prerequisite for the next research grant for the next technological breakthrough, so both companies license the recently discovered technology off shore. The carbon accounting required for manufacturing can never be allowed to threaten their competition between Alpha and Beta when asking for the consideration at the next round of government research grants.
Show me the study that shows the carbon footprint required to maintain and repay the United States national debt! There is no such study. Therefore, money borrowed from China that is used for green businesses has no carbon footprint. And any effort Beta makes to supply it's own cash for a green business will pull Beta away from being as green as Alpha is. Yet Alpha only exists as a parasite in government spending.
It is not fair to say that funding can only be green if it has been given to you by the government. And it is intuitive to suspect that carbon accounting practices will say exactly that conclusion.
If Alpha uses money the the government borrowed from China, then there must be a calculation for the carbon accounting required to pay interest and repay the debt. Only then will you know if Alpha is truly greener than Beta. And you guys are just fooling yourselves if you imagine this carbon accounting is going to be practiced without lawyers telling this story to a civil lawsuit jury in a court room full of laid off workers.
Why is there no study to show the carbon footprint of the national debt? I'll tell you why. Because the Green movement is a bunch of stupid idiots who will believe ANYTHING THEY ARE TOLD. And none of the greenies want to see this information fall into the hands of a hysterical public. IF environmentalists attacked the national debt like they want to attack everything else, it would dissolve your illusions and deceptions and lies into a corrected direction for our country's future. Just look at the articles in this website. The failure of the green economy is blamed on everything from Bin Laden to the U.S. Constitution. Nothing is out of bounds for you guys EXCEPT THIS NATIONAL DEBT.
What does that tell you?
I could say you are killing the planet when you have a Pepsi burp unless you hold them in and bottle your farts. Then you need to bury the bottles. You environmentalists would believe it and act all neurotically upset about it. It would be the lead story on the evening news.
You don't look at the national debt because you don't want your gullible followers to think that way. You won't want to have the mob of hysteria focused in that direction. There is no study of the carbon footprint of the national debt because such a story would not allow you any clear path to mislead the Amercan people any more.
Your time is running out. Your money is running out. Enron style scandals are uncovered in your data and conclusions every day. It is all unravelling. Soon, the green movement will be nothing more than an embarrasing chapter in our country's history.
Carbon accounting... what a hoot!