Category Archives: Uncategorized

I’m not your go-to person for an analysis of the legal profession or the economics of law firms. But the recent collapse of Dewey & LeBoeuf, resonates with me because I hear in its story the consequences of operating without a systems perspective and or a sustainability mindset.

As the New York Times reported today, the firm filed for bankruptcy last night. “With historical roots stretching back a century, Dewey — the product of a 2007 merger between Dewey Ballantine and LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae — employed at its peak more than 2,500 people, including roughly 1,400 lawyers in 26 offices across the globe,” according to the Times. 

But the firm came apart because of a series of actions and policies that undermined its ability to sustain itself. 

Many observers say the root causes of Dewey’s fall are not unique. Several of the largest firms have adopted business strategies that Dewey embraced: unfettered growth, often through mergers; the aggressive poaching of lawyers from rivals by offering outsize pay packages; and a widening spread between the salaries of the firm’s top partners and its most junior ones.

 

These trends, they say, have destroyed the fabric of a law firm partnership, where a shared sense of purpose once created willingness to weather difficult times. Many large firms have discarded the traditional notions of partnership — loyalty, collegiality, a sense of equality — and instead transformed themselves into bottom-line, profit-maximizing businesses.

 

“Because the partnership lacks any shared cultural values or history, money becomes the core value holding the firm together,” said William Henderson, a law professor at Indiana University who studies law firms. “Money is weak glue.”

Doesn’t it seem like the firm treated the values of partnership as externalities, when it might have placed those values at the center of its management approach? If it had, it might have found greater resilience in the face of the challenges that many law firms have experience over the last few years. 

We are starting a new initiative at Green Research that I think will be of interest to students, recent graduates and mid-career folks looking to make a place for themselves in the world of clean tech or sustainability.

We are recruiting interns (unpaid—sorry) with excellent writing skills and a professional interest in environmental sustainability or clean technology. Your task is to contribute one short piece of analytical writing per month to our blog. Each intern takes on a topic or industry that we mutually agree on, follows the business and technology news on that topic, and pulls together a thoughtful analysis on the news of the prior month that has important implications for business leaders, sustainability professionals or investors. Your piece will be published under your name on the Green Research blog and highlighted in our monthly e-mail newsletter.

We’ll provide you with a template to help you shape your thinking and writing and professional feedback and editing to help you refine your ideas into polished pieces. I think it’s a great way to deepen your knowledge of sustainability or clean tech and to gain exposure for your ideas.

My hope is that along the way, we will identify topics in your area that would benefit from a deeper treatment as a research study. If we do, we’ll give you the opportunity to participate the creation of a professional market research study.

Here’s a sample of topics and industries I’d love to have folks working on:

If you’re interested or want more info, please drop me a line!

Still trying to get a grip on biofuels. I came across this assessment of their potential from WorldWatch:

In the most optimistic scenarios, bioenergy could provide for more than two times the current global energy demand, without competing with food production, forest protection efforts, and biodiversity. In the least favorable scenarios, however, bioenergy could supply only a fraction of current energy use by 2050, perhaps even less than it provides today.

There you have it.

Last time I wrote that environmental challenges are so great that it is difficult to see how we will meet them. However,  I wrote,

The march of technological progress, which has transformed so many areas of business and life, will accelerate our environmental progress too, as long as we’re pointing in the right direction, as long as we are aligned with the vector of progress and can therefore harness that progress.

There’s no question that to meet our environmental goals while continuing to improve standards of living there will need to be advances in a range of energy and clean technologies.  But technology is not the only area were we need to innovate. A big chunk of what needs to be done can be achieved with current technology. It just requires innovation on the policy front.

I just reread a study issued by the McKinsey Global institute. The paper, “The Case for Investing in Energy Productivity,” was published a year ago. Using detailed economic and financial models, it makes the case that the technology available today is sufficient to halve the growth in energy demand through 202o. What’s more, if deployed in the manner suggested in the paper, it could deliver up to half the abatement of greenhouse gases required to stabilize global temperatures.

The global investment in energy productivity envisioned by the study would deliver an internal rate of return of 17 percent. The technology required already exists. It includes relatively mundane items such as combined heat and power generation, optimization of electric mothers, increased use of recycled paper, liquid membrane separation and many others.

What is so striking about this analysis is that it suggests that there are no trade offs required to achieve the benefits of reduced energy demand and reduced greenhouse gas emissions, since doing so produces a return that is better than many capital investments.

To achieve this, though, would be no small feat. It requires not technology innovation but policy innovation. Innovative policies are needed to stimulate and fund worldwide investments in energy productivity that market forces and micro-economic decision making alone will not.

Is it just me or does there seem to be a consensus emerging that some of the most important challenges facing society (see also economic melt down, health care, social security, among others) require policy, rather than purely market, solutions? I welcome your comments.

My interest in clean tech stems from my love of the environment and my interest in the technology and personal and business practices that can help protect it. If you are just tuning in to the question of how to limit our harm to the environment, you will eventually be confronted with a couple of big questions.

How Do You Know You’re Doing Good?

Determining which of two actions is better for the environment can be harder than it looks. I’ve heard of studies showing that, for example, that the carbon footprint of a bottle of wine imported to the East Coast of the U.S. from France is higher than that of a bottle sent from California, despite the fact that California is closer.

A new book by sustainability guru Joel Makower has many examples of spurious environmental claims made by consumer product manufacturers, such as “photodegradable” Hefty plastic trash bags that deteriorate over time if exposed to sunlight and oxygen, which they never are in a landfill.

It is difficult for consumers to assess environmental claims. And it can be difficult for companies to undertake environmentally friendly initiatives when they run the risk of consumer backlash. (Makower relates the story of Levi’s, which was quietly experimenting with integration a small amount of organic cotton into its products. They wanted to keep it quiet lest they draw attention to the fact that they are big cotton users and industrial cultivation of cotton creates substantial environmental stresses.)

If you consider how difficult it is to do good for the environment (without causing unintended negative consequences), you might think it’s more trouble than it’s worth to try.

Will Any Action Be Enough to Make a Difference?

The challenges facing society in grappling with environmental ills are daunting. If you consider how much needs to be achieved in order to slow or reverse the trend toward devastating global warming, for example, you might think that it’s too late to have an impact and that the cost of trying is wasted money.

Makower cites a 2004 paper that enumerated a set of goals that its authors said would have to be achieved over the next 50 years in order to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions and avert environmental catastrophe. Unfortunately, the simultaneous achievement of those goals is so challenging as to make success seem just about impossible. They are:

• Double the fuel economy of 2 billion cars worldwide from 30 to 60 miles per gallon (though there are only 850 million cars on the planet today)
• Decrease car travel for 2 billion 30-mgp cars from 10,000 to 5,000 miles per year
• Cut carbon emissions by 25 percent in buildings and appliances
• Cut elecricity use in all homes, offices, and stores by 25 percent
• Replace 1,400 large coal-fired power plants with gas-fired plants
• Increase solar power 700-fold from current levels to displace coal-fired power plants
• Increase wind power 80-fold from current levels to produce hydrogen for cars

Why Bother?

With these challenges, why should anyone bother doing anything to try to minimize his or her harm to the environment, especially when many environmentally sensitive choices seem to increase costs?

And even if you are persuaded to pay more to reduce your impact on the environment, how much more should you pay? The value of averting global catastrophe might be beyond measure. But how much of the cost to do so should my company bear? Why should I bear the cost of reducing carbon emissions today if the world will never in aggregate reduce enough to make any difference?

Pursuing Broader Benefits

The magnitude of the challenge and the uncertainty of the environmental payoff is is why advocates of pro-environmental strategies look for benefits greater than just environmental ones. Well-designed sustainability strategies pursue multiple returns on the investment in sustainability to increase the probability of a good payback for those investments. Such returns may include:

• reducing costs
• increasing quality
• increasing efficiency
• building good will with customers, partners and employees
• greater efficiency
• stimulating innovation, development of new technology, new markets

It’s definitely possible to achieve several of these objectives in tandem with environmental ones. Dell, whose sustainability reporting I recently looked at, is just one company that trumpets its success in doing so, touting reduced electricity use, packaging waste, and substantial cost savings along with reduced environmental footprint.

Aligning With the Vector of Progress

With such large environmental challenges, we may not be able to see perfectly how we’ll achieve our environmental goals. But it’s important that companies and individuals at least take teps in the right direction. The march of technological progress, which has transformed so many areas of business and life, will accelerate our environmental progress too, as long as we’re pointing in the right direction, as long as we are aligned with the vector of progress and can therefore harness that progress. It’s useful to consider Moore’s law–the phenomenon of relentless and rapid increase in the power of integrated circuits, that has has transformed science fiction into reality in a generation.

Consumers can do their part but business is where innovation happens at scale. Business need to take the lean in harnessing the vector of progress.

Business is where innovation and scale happen. Business has to lead.

The Wall Street Journal reported numbers this week that released by the Cleantech Group indicating $1.7 billion in VC investments globally in the fourth quarter of 2008. The story lead with the observation that this was the “steepest quarterly drop in two years” and “the smallest amount in six quarters.” But how does $1.7 billion look in the context of VC activity generally?

According to Cleantech again, US-based clean tech VC investments in the third quarter amounted to $1.7 billion–equal to the global total in Q4. It’s also more VC investment that flowed to any single industry sector in the third quarter, according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association.

If you look at the NVCA/PWC chart you may well wonder how to compare their industry classifications with Cleantech’s. Clean tech as a category would seem to span 4 or more of the standard categories enumerated there.

I’ve got a note into Cleantech asking for some clarification.

My initial impression is that, even with the decline, there’s still a ton of money going into clean tech overall.

How would you characterize clean tech investment trends? Would love your input.

I do not believe I ever portrayed myself as a climate scientist, modest fellow that I am. But like everyone else who cares about current events and the future of mankind, I try to stay informed and make the best decisions I can.

That’s why it makes me nuts when “controversies” over critically important issues persist, even after gargantuan research efforts . Climate change is one of those issues. Just today, The Wall Street Journal wrote on its editorial page, “The risks of fossil fuels remain speculative…” Really? How do they have the chutzpah to say that in the face of so much evidence. Or as the Journal would print it, “evidence”?

I don’t have the time to independently verify the work off the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (though with Swiss top-level domain, many would find them a questionable source). Or any of the other work that’s been done. But I’d like to feel like an educated person can begin to reach some conclusions on this topic.

The Wall Street Journal is not sure yet.  It’s obvious that their opinion pages are about free market ideology, and it’s hard to see a path to addressing global warming that doesn’t seem to impinge on that ideology a bit. So, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the Journal is paid not to understand this issue.

It made me wonder what other editorial pages are saying about the topic. So I had a look at the editorial position of the top ten newspapers (by circualtion).  Believe me, that is not as easy as it sounds. Some of them have very cruddy search engines. Some don’t allow you to searhc by section of the paper. Some do but omit the editorial section. Google is often better searching some of these sites than their own internal search function.  Nonetheless, I pulled the following info together.

You can see that 8 of the top 10 papers are sympathetic to the position that global warming is real, man made, serious, and requires action. The New York Post is also skeptical and the Houston Chronicle is open but inconclusive. Have a look.

USA Today (May 13, 2008)
“…the good news is that the next occupant of the White House sees the need for aggressive action. “

Wall Street Journal (December 5, 2008)
“The risks of fossil fuels remain speculative…”

New York Times (November 26, 2008)
“If Mr. Obama follows through on his commitments, this country will at last provide the global leadership that is essential for addressing the dangers of climate change.”

Los Angeles Times ( October 15, 2008)

“global warming is a serious problem”

Washington Post (October 29, 2008)
“With global warming happening more quickly than scientists predicted, Earth can’t wait.”

New York Daily News (October 13, 2007)
“…there is no disputing that Gore played a vital role in persuading our sometimes stubborn brains that something very bad has been happening. And that it will only get worse unless there are meaningful changes in energy policy, energy consumption and plain old wasting of natural resources.”

“To wait and see on climate change, however, is to play with fire.”
Chicago Tribune (May 20, 2008) [link to an aggregator]
“Global warming is more than ample grounds for levying taxes on carbon-based fuels, including gasoline, to reduce emissions. But those
taxes would fall partly on foreign oil producers.”

New York Post
“Here’s one more reason to be skeptical of the West’s continuing climate-change frenzy: Russia loves it. “

Newsday (February 3, 2008)

Endorsement of John McCain in the NY Primary: “he has recognized the dangers posed by climate change”

Houston Chronicle (October 25, 2007)

“Before locking us into a new generation of coal-burning power plants that will last a half century or more, state regulators should carefully review the latest science on the issue and consider becoming part of the solution to climate change rather than the problem.”

Innovation in the Internet industry has tended to occur in marketing and software engineering. In clean tech, a lot of the innovation is in engineering but also in basic science, such as chemistry and physics. The other day I saw a presentation about what you’d think was a thoroughly mundane topic: extracting energy from waste. But when you understand the context, this is a cool opportunity.

Bill Davis, CEO of Ze-Gen was presenting at Greentech Media’s electricity conference this week. He described his technology for converting waste from construction sites into syngas, or synthetic gas, a valuable fuel with numerous industrial uses.

I found some of the stats in Bill’s presentation especially compelling:

• Over 4 billion metric tons of waste generated each year (World Waste Survey, 2006)
• 1 ton of solid waste produces the equivalent of about 1 ton CO2e GHG (US EPA 2002)
• Solid waste contains >50% of the energy value of coal per ton
• Only 2% of this is used

Here’s some info from the EPA on the lifecycle of waste.

Ze-Gen’s process involves immersing waste in a pool of molten iron. The heat breaks down the molecules in the waste, releasing the gas, which is then captured and can be processed further or sold.

Ze-Gen’s revenues are expected to come principally from selling the gas to industrial buyers but also from “tipping fees”–the fees that companies disposing large amounts of industrial waste must pay to whoever agrees to take it.

It appears that Ze-Gen and other companies working on this application (there seem to be at least a dozen) have an opportunity to make money while shrinking landfills and reducing the greenhouse gas emissions. A big win all around.

What I’ve learned so far is that fuel cells, a technology that has been around a while and has had niche applications till now, has the potential to become a mainstream alternative to internal combustion engines in cars 5 to 10 years from now. The technology is way too expensive to be practical for automotive applications today. For now, there are some pretty interesting but narrower industrial uses.

What is a Fuel Cell?

A fuel cell is a gizmo that converts the energy stored in a fuel such as methanol or hydrogen into electricity. Unlike a battery, which contains a fixed amount of stored energy, fuel is fed into a fuel cell much the way gasoline is fed into an internal combustion engine. Instead of combusting and producing kinetic (motion) energy, a fuel cell produces electrical energy, which can be used to power an electric motor or provide power to other systems. Numerous fuel cell technologies exist and fuel cells have been designed to work with a variety of fuels including gasoline, natural gas, methanol and hydrogen.

You can think of a fuel cell like a generator that takes in fuel and produces electricity. But fuel cells are quiet, may produce no pollution (depending on the fuel) and are much more efficient than internal combustion generators. The Department of Energy says that hydrogen fuel cells are two to three times more efficient than gasoline engines.

Fuel Cells in Cars?

Early fuel cell applications were to provide electrical power in remote locations such as in space or in rural areas. But there is a lot of interest in applying them to transportation today. Fuel cells powered by hydrogen fuel cells are nonpolluting and hydrogen can be produced from sources other than petroleum. (However, the production of hydrogen itself can be polluting.) Honda has started producing a car called the FCX Clarity which is powered by a hydrogen fuel cell rather than an internal combustion engine.

Cost is one of the major obstacles to the adoption of hydrogen fuel cells. Honda’s FCX Clarity costs several hundred thousand dollars to produce in today’s small volumes. One study predicts that by 2015, at high production volumes, hydrogen fuel cell costs will drop to $49 per KW, or $4900 for a 100KW fuel cell like the one in the FCX Clarity. The looks like it could make such vehicles competitive with gas-powered cars, assuming hydrogen works out to be a competitive fuel.

The production of hydrogen has its own costs and its own environmental consequences, which are factors in how attractive hydrogen fuel cells might be as an alternative to gasoline engines. Another huge factor is distribution: over about a hundred years a vast gasoline distribution network has arisen. Creating something comparable for hydrogen is no small feat. I hope to look into both of those issues in a future posts.

Applications for Fuel Cells Today

At Greentech Media’s recent conference on the future of electric technology, we heard from a company called Oorja, a company that designs and manufactures fuel cells powered by methanol. These seem to be much more cost-effective than hydrogen fuel cells but they produce emissions such as carbon monoxide.

Applications they are pursuing include powering forklifts and providing backup power to telecom installations and they claim cost competitiveness with batteries and diesel generators. Benefits vs. battery-powered forklifts supposedly include faster recharge time and lower costs. In telecom backup vs. batteries or diesel generators the benefits include cost, flexibility and longer power protection.

It seems like these niche applications are ripe today, but large-scale use in automobiles could be a decade away.

Thoughts? Questions? Comments? Post away.

I’m doing some research on fuel cells. I’ll be looking at the cells themselves; hydrogen as an energy carrier; and distribution and storage questions. I plan do to couple of posts over the next few days.

The dimensions you need to consider to assess any energy technology include:

• efficiency
• greenhouse gas emissions
• cost

and depending on the application, there are other factors that can be very important, including:

• size
• weight
• operating temperature

There is a lot of material out there on fuel cells, and I’m combing through some of it now to compile some initial thoughts. In the meantime, if you have any favorite sources, feel free to comment here and post links to them. Thanks.

The New York Times recently ran an article on efforts by retailers to incorporate environmentally friendly designs into their stores.

• Pizza Fusion has store in Florida that reuses draft from ovens to heat water
• McDonalds renovated a restaurant on the South Side of Chicago “crammed with energy- and water-saving gadgets,” including pavement that filters rainwater; tables and chairs made out of recycled material; and a garden on the roof.
• Subway opened 5 “ecostores”

But are these initiatives anything more than stunts intended to color the companies green?

The article quoted an e-mail from a nutritionist who was unimpressed with these initiatives. “Takes your mind off the calories, doesn’t it?” she wrote. But nutrition is a separate question, isn’t it? As long as there are fast food restaurants, shouldn’t they at least be energy efficient?

Other retailers mentioned in the article were:

• Target, Office Depot, Staples, which have opened “green” stores
• Kohl’s, which opened 45 stores built using recycled materials, water-saving plumbing, on-site recycling
• Best Buy, which has announced plans to green their stores

Wal-Mart has committed to spend $500 million annually to increase its own energy efficiency. According to the article, Wal-Mart’s high-efficiency stores save 20-45% in energy costs compared with traditional stores, savings that will have a big impact on Wal-Mart’s bottom line: energy is the company’s second biggest operating expense after personnel.

Electricity is a significant expense for all retailers. According to a 1995 EIA study, retailers used 149 billion kWh of electricity annually, an energy intensity of 11.8 kWh per square foot. (Food service establishments, like the fast-food places cited above, have an energy intensity up to three times greater than retailers. Figures from 2003 available here.)

Burrito Chain’s High-Profile Green Move

One highly visible initiative was recently undertaken by Chipotle, the burrito chain, which installed a 6 KW wind turbine outside a new store in the Chicago suburbs of Gurnee. The company says the turbine should generate about 10 percent of the restaurant’s electricity, or about 8 hours of lighting a day.

Skeptics say the wind turbine is more about PR than renewable energy. An article in Treehugger typified this point of view

“Gurnee being several miles from the Lake Michigan shore, capacity factor for the turbine is likely to be sub-optimal. But, the novelty factor will certainly draw customer attention. Americans, after all, are new to the sight of a wind turbine in a retail or commercial setting.”

A representative of Industrial Wind Action Group, an opponent of wind energy, was quoted last year as saying, “If the intent was to lessen electricity use, they’d almost certainly do better by changing some of the light bulbs or decreasing their air conditioning use.”

Indeed, the area doesn’t seem to be that windy, with speeds averaging below 10mph throughout the year, but with some gusts between 10-20 and as high as 30. (Some sources (here and here) I consulted says an average wind speeds of at least 9-10 miles per hour are required for economical wind power generation.)

And The New York Times article reported that a Wal-Mart official said that the company has found that “large wind turbines did not make sense at its stores.”

Wind Project Works for Energy, Money, and PR

A back of the envelope calculation indicates that Chipotle can probably save some money with the Gurnee wind turbine.

Wind Turbines of that capacity are said to cost between $3,000 and $5,000 per kilowatt of capacity. At the midpoint, then, the Gurnee turbine would cost $24,000. At a 5% cost of capital, that’s $104 per month.

The local power company, ComEd, lists a price of $116.16 per 1000 KWH.

A turbine generating 6KW continuously 24 hours a day for 30 days generates 4320 KWH, worth about $500 per month at current prices. Even if the turbine’s efficiency were one quarter the rated maximum, at current prices, it would be a break-even to slightly profitable project.

It seems likely that Chipotle will spare some fossil fuels and save some money with its restaurant wind turbines. But the biggest return on investment for Chipotle will probably be the PR spin generated by those turbines.