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Business schools are going green
Global warming has become a hot topic
Rebecca Knight, Financial Times
Along with customary classes on subjects such as finance, accounting, and marketing, today’s MBA students are enrolling on courses for environmental policy and stewardship. Indeed, more than half – 54 per cent – of business schools require a course in environmental sustainability or corporate social responsibility, up from 34 per cent in 2001, according to a biennial survey of 91 US business schools by the World Resources Institute and the Aspen Institute, published in October 2005.
Within the realm of environmental studies, perhaps the topic garnering the most attention is global warming. Business schools in the US and around the world are coming up with new ways to integrate global warming into established courses, as well as instituting new classes.
At MIT’s Sloan School of Business, climate change has gone from being included in soft electives on the periphery of the curriculum to the centre of an innovative course on environmental sustainability.
(29 Jan 2007)
How to Get Wall Street to Hug a Tree
David Wolman, LA Times
Environmentalists and investment bankers are working together to put a price tag on nature. The new ‘greens’ think that human beings are ready to start paying for Mother Nature’s services-and that calculating their financial worth will save the planet.
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Gretchen Daily, an ecologist at Stanford University, wears butterfly-patterned socks. She’s a careful recycler and bikes to work. She composts.
So what’s she doing hanging out with guys from Goldman Sachs?
As a tried-and-true “green,” she believes she doesn’t have a choice.
“Time is running short,” she says. “Appealing to moral sense isn’t enough anymore. We have to make conservation fit mainstream business calculations.”
In her fourth-floor office in the Herrin Labs just off Stanford’s main quad, Daily, a professor of biological sciences and director of the tropical research program at Stanford’s Center of Conservation Biology, shows me what she means. She clicks open a series of digital maps compiled for a meeting in New York with Goldman Sachs. The maps’ rich purple-and-blue hues convey information about California’s Central Coast eco-region, which stretches from Santa Barbara north to Napa County and includes San Francisco Bay. Daily explains how each image tells a story of the terrain’s value-not property value as a real estate agent would figure it but value in terms of service to mankind. Where the terrain offers a high degree of flood protection, for example, the map is the brightest purple; where the flood-protecting function is comparatively low, the color is light blue. The ecosystems providing the most overall value to people are shaded to indicate highest priority.
If Daily and her colleagues can get Wall Street on board, the maps will also be shaded to indicate financial worth.
This is the future of the environmental movement. Increasingly, economic measures are being used to assess ecosystems by way of the universally comprehensible currency of money.
David Wolman is the author of “A Left-Hand Turn Around the World” and has written for Wired, Newsweek Discover and other magazines.
(11 Feb 2007)
Dr. Gretchen Daily is a colleague of ecologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich.
WorldChanging just published a related article: Ecosystem Goods and Services Series: Valuation 101
Governments struggle to find policies that will spur renewable-energy industries — without coddling them
Leila Abboud, Wall Street Journal
Since the oil shocks of the 1970s, governments around the world have paid plenty of lip service to renewable energies such as wind and solar power. But only a few governments have been able to engineer policies that have begun to bring alternative energies into wider use.
Renewable fuels provided 18% of the world’s total electricity supply in 2004, according to figures from the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based intergovernmental organization.
Almost all of that, though, came from hydropower, a source with limited growth potential because of geographic constraints. The use of wind and solar power is growing, but they still generated only 1% of global electricity production in 2004, the latest year for which figures are available.
In Asia, the U.S. and Europe, governments have spent billions on research and development of renewable energies over the years, but finding effective policies to encourage their use has proved just as challenging as developing new technologies. Most governments have tried approaches like tax credits, subsidies and mandated targets for renewable-energy production. Although approaches differ, the overarching goal is the same: to spur companies to build large-scale renewable-energy plants, such as wind farms or solar installations, so that the costs of clean power come down enough to compete with fossil fuels like oil and coal.
A debate still rages over what kind of government intervention and level of subsidy is appropriate.
(12 Feb 2007)
WSJ articles are usually behind a paywall. This one seems free for the moment.
Another related item from WSJ: Podcast on Renewable Energy:
Wall Street Journal reporter Rebecca Smith discusses the reasons why renewable power is expanding and why alternative energy needs to be combined with energy efficiency and conservation to get the greatest benefit.
.The articles are part of a special energy section in the WSJ. Kalpa at The Oil Drum writes:
The WSJ alternative energy article listed above, is part of a 14 page section on alternative energy. On page 2, under “Recommended Reading”, they feature Matthew Simmons.
“Peak oil” theory posits that it is only a matter of time before oil output hits the height of its bell curve, but Mr. Simmons believes production may have already crested in December 2005. More urgent than the date of the peak, he argues, is the need to overhaul the way the world views transportation needs.
-BA
High energy
Staff, The Economist
THE scientific consensus in favour of man-made global warming seems clear. There is also evidence that voters are increasingly inclined to believe in the phenomenon, even in America.
This might lead one to believe that politicians will be forced to take action. But, as Tim Bond, of Barclays Capital, points out, the futures markets appear to be saying something different. The forward curves for hydrocarbon fuels (such as oil and coal) are upward-sloping: higher prices are expected in future. ..
Conversely, the price curves of cleaner alternatives are downward-sloping. This does not suggest investors are expecting a mass shift away from oil and towards green fuel sources such as wind and solar power. Perhaps this reflects understandable cynicism that voters will ever agree to changes that cause them real pain: higher gasoline taxes in America, for example. ..
The attempt to square this circle may have important repercussions for financial markets. As Tim Bond says, an enormous amount of new investment is needed to meet increased energy demand―some $20 trillion, at 2000 prices. The energy industry did double its capital spending in nominal terms between 2000 and 2005, but thanks to infrastructure inflation (the cost of oil rigs, tankers etc), this translated into a real spending increase of only 10-20%. ..
Most investors seem to regard global warming as a long-term problem unlikely to affect equities over the next year or two. But the Barclays analysis suggests they may be wrong to be so complacent.
(11 Feb 2007)
