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Recent Posts by Marc Gunther
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While carbon offsets are controversial and always will be, they have enormous potential to promote an elusive goal: sustainable development. At their best, carbon offsets are a low-cost way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, transfer clean technology to poor countries and help people out of poverty.Which brings us to JPMorgan Chase and cook stoves.The global Wall Street investment bank has begun subsidizing the production and distribution of efficient cooking stoves in Africa, an effort that could expand to India and southeast Asia as well. The project is the topic of today’s Sustainability column on fortune.com and cnnmoney.com. Here’s how it begins: By any measure, it is a long way from the Park Avenue headquarters of JPMorgan Chase, the global investment bank that generated
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Carbon neutral, you may remember, was the word of the year back in 2006, but as my friend Joel Makower (executive editor of greenbiz.com, aka the guru of green business) has written, no one knows exactly what it means or even how to define a company’s carbon footprint.So when Dell announced today that the company had become carbon neutral, I decided to take a closer look in my Sustainability column at fortune.com and cnnmoney.com. Here’s how the column begins:Dell is announcing Wednesday that it has become carbon neutral by turning out the lights in its offices, buying wind power and protecting endangered forests in Madagascar.It’s all part of CEO Michael Dell’s commitment to make the company that he started back in 1984 “the greenest technology company on the planet.”But
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There’s a fair bit of cynicism out there about Product (Red), the celebrity-inspired idea that we can help poor victims of AIDS in Africa by going shopping. See, for example, the pointed parody at www.buylesscrap.org, which says, among other things, “Join us in rejecting the ti(red) notion that shopping is a reasonable response to human suffering.”Then again, there’s this number: $110 million. That’s the amount of money that (Red) partners have generated for the Global Fund To Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to provide AIDS treatment in Ghana, Rwanda, Swaziland and Lesotho. Bono and Bobby Shriver created Product (Red) a couple of years ago, and now you can buy (Red) phones from Motorola, (Red) iPods from
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I’m growing tired of reading (and writing) about companies that are “going green,” except if the company is named Wal-Mart or GE or has an outsized influence on its industry. Far more interesting is the question of how entire industries and markets can be transformed so they become more sustainable. This is happening, albeit slowly, in several industries—fishing and forestry come to mind—but what’s caught my attention lately are some significant changes coming to the TV industry. I’m not talking about trends in TV news or programming (which I covered for many years) but about recyling old TVs. Last week, LG Electronics USA, the North American unit of the big Korean electronics firm, and Waste Management announced a nationwide recycling program that should make it
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I’d ordinarily be reluctant to take on Warren Buffett and the Girls Scouts of America in a single blog post, but this story is too good to pass up. Have you heard? Dairy Queen, which is a unit of Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, struck a deal with the Girl Scouts to incorporate the Thin Mint, the best-selling of the Girl Scout cookies, into one of its Blizzards, an ice-cold drink. The result of this ill-advised merger, according to a news release from DQ and the scouts, is a A creamy soft serve blended with Girl Scouts Thin Mint Cookie pieces and a Crème de Menthe topping to create this summer’s blockbuster – the DQ® Girl Scouts Thin Mint Cookie Blizzard. Have they not heard about America’s obesity crisis? The nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest couldn’t resist
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Sweet News from Mars
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Some exciting news today from Mars, the giant candy maker: The company is going to spend $10 million to decode the genome of the cacao tree. The goal is to guarantee the company a long-term supply of chocolate, improve the livelihood farmers and help preserve the environment in the tropics where cacao trees grow.
“This is the dream of a lifetime for a plant breeder,” Howard Yana-Shapiro of Mars told me, over the phone from Rome, where he is attending a meeting of the Food and Agriculture Organization. “And especially for someone who’s interested in sustainability.”
Howard spoke at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm: Green conference in April. If you were there, you noticed him—he was the friendly guy with the long white beard that stretched down to his belly. He’s a fascinating and accomplished man – he’s worked on crops all over the developing world, written books about gardening, taught at a university and was vice president of agriculture for the organize seed and food company Seeds of Change when it was acquired by Mars. Twice a Fulbright Scholar, twice a Ford Foundation Fellow, Howard is also an organic farmer, on land in New Mexico that was first farmed by the Tewa, then by Spanish conquistadors, and has been cultivated continuously for over 3000 years.
The Washington Post had a good story this morning about the Mars chocolate genome project. Essentially, the company will work with IBM and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to sequence and analyze the cocoa genome, after which all of the information it gathers will be made public. That should set off a global effort among plant breeders to figure out how to make trees that are more productive, that resist disease or drought, require less water, or can grow on less land—ushering in a revolution in the world of chocolate. It’s an open-source approach to making farming more sustainable, the Mozilla of chocolate.
“We need the biggest toolbox possible so that plant breeders everywhere can go to work on behalf of cocoa farmers,” Howard says. “We are unique as a corporation, as a private company, because we can think far into the future.” The project will take at least five years to complete, and years after that to pay off for farmers. “We’re talking about cocoa trees that can last 25 to 40 years,” he said.
If all goes well, cacao farmers will need less land and have to spend less money to grow their cash crop. Their trees will be robust. They can use the rest of the land to grow fruit or nuts for their family, or to grow trees for timber or even to leave forests alone so they can sequester carbon. About 70 percent of the world’s cocoa is produced in West Africa.
This is, in other words, exactly the kind of big thinking we need to make global agriculture more sustainable.
I also chatted briefly with Ajay Royyuru, senior manager of IBM’s Computational Biology Center. IBM will lend its brainpower and computer power to the project, after Mars’ scientists map out cocoa’s DNA. “Our role is taking the information and breathing meaning into it,” Royyuru says. Here’s an IBM website about computational biology & medical informations that explains what they do better than I can. Interestingly, the cocoa project dovetails with IBM’s broader efforts to plant a stake in Africa, which I wrote a column about last December. (The more I learn about IBM, the more impressed I am by the company’s values.)
Mars is a famously private company, but they seem to be opening up a little. I’m hoping to meet Howard next week at the company’s unassuming headquarters in McLean, Va., to learn more about his work on cocoa and write a column for cnnmoney.com.
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