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Going Green
With windmills, low-energy homes, new forms of recycling and
fuel-efficient cars, Americans are taking conservation into their own hands.
By Jerry Adler
Newsweek
July 17, 2006 issue - One morning last week ... 29 years after president
Jimmy Carter declared energy conservation "the moral equivalent of war"
... 37 years after the first reference to the "greenhouse effect" in The
New York Times ... one day after oil prices hit a record peak of more
than $75 per barrel ... Kelley Howell, a 38-year-old architect, got on
her bicycle a little after 5 a.m. and rode 7.9 miles past shopping
centers, housing developments and a nature preserve to a bus stop to
complete her 24-mile commute to work. Compared with driving in her 2004
Mini Cooper, the 15.8-mile round trip by bicycle conserved approximately
three fifths of a gallon of gasoline, subtracting 15 pounds of potential
carbon dioxide pollution from the atmosphere (minus the small additional
amount she exhaled as a result of her exertion). That's 15 pounds out of
1.7 billion tons of carbon produced annually to fuel all the vehicles in
the United States. She concedes that when you look at it that way, it
doesn't seem like very much. "But if you're not doing something and the
next family isn't doing anything, then who will?"
On that very question the course of civilization may rest. In the face
of the coming onslaught of pollutants from a rapidly urbanizing China
and India, the task of avoiding ecological disaster may seem hopeless,
and some environmental scientists have, quietly, concluded that it is.
But Americans are notoriously reluctant to surrender their fates to the
impersonal outcomes of an equation. One by oneâand together, in state
and local governments and even giant corporationsâthey are attempting
to wrest the future from the dotted lines on the graphs that point to
catastrophe. The richest country in the world is also the one with the
most to lose.
Environmentalism waxes and wanes in importance in American politics, but
it appears to be on the upswing now. Membership in the Sierra Club is up
by about a third, to 800,000, in four years, and Gallup polling data
show that the number of Americans who say they worry about the
environment "a great deal" or "a fair amount" increased from 62 to 77
percent between 2004 and 2006. (The 2006 poll was done in March, before
the attention-getting release of Al Gore's global-warming film, "An
Inconvenient Truth.") Americans have come to this view by many routes,
sometimes reluctantly; Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club,
thinks unhappiness with the Bush administration's environmental record
plays a part, but many of the people NEWSWEEK spoke to for this story
are Republicans. "Al Gore can't convince me, but his data can convince
me," venture capitalist Ray Lane remarks ruefully. Lane is a general
partner in the prominent Silicon Valley firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield
& Byers, which has pledged to invest $100 million in green technology.
He arrived at his position as a "Republican environmentalist" while
pondering three trends: global warming, American dependence on foreign
oil and the hypermodernization of Asian societies.
Others got to the same place by way of religion, most prominently
Richard Cizik, director of governmental relations for the National
Association of Evangelicalsâbut also people like Sally Bingham, an
Episcopal priest in San Francisco and a founder of the religious
environmental group Interfaith Power and Light. A moderate Republican,
she had to defend herself on a talk-radio show from a listener who
accused her of buying into the liberal myth of global warming. "I am,"
she pronounced frostily, "a religious person called to care for creation
from this platform." And many followed their own idiosyncratic paths,
like Howell, who started researching the connections between food,
health and the environment after her mother died of cancer. Soon she and
her husband, JD, found themselves caught up in replacing all their light
bulbs and toilets with more-efficient versions and weighing their
garbage, which by obsessive recycling they have reduced to less than 10
pounds a week.
But probably the most common formative experience is one that Wendy
Abrams of Highland Park, Ill., underwent six years ago, as she was
reading an article about global climate change over the next century;
she looked up from her magazine and saw her four children, who will be
alive for most of it. That was the year the hybrid Prius went on sale in
the United States, and she bought one as soon as she could. This
reflects what Pope describes as a refocusing of environmental concern
from issues like safe drinking water, which were local and concrete, to
climate change, which is global and abstract. Or so it was, anyway,
until it came crashing into New Orleans last summer with the force of a
million tons of reprints from The Journal of Climate. Katrina, says
Pope, "changed people's perceptions of what was at stake"âeven though
no one can prove that the hurricane was directly caused by global warming.
All over America, a post-Katrina future is taking shape under the banner
of "sustainability." Architects vie to create the most sustainable
skyscrapers. The current champion in Manhattan appears to be Norman
Foster's futuristic headquarters for the Hearst Corp., lit to its
innermost depths by God's own high-efficiency light source, the sun. The
building's "destination dispatch" elevators require passengers to enter
their floor at a kiosk, where a screen directs them to a cab, grouping
them to wring the last watt of efficiency from their 30-second trips.
But it is expected to be challenged soon in Manhattan by a new Bank of
America tower, designed by Cook & Fox, which takes "sustainability" to a
point just short of growing its own food. Every drop of rain that falls
on its roof will be captured for use; scraps from the cafeteria will be
fermented in the building to produce methane as a supplementary fuel for
a generator intended to produce more than half the building's
electricity; the waste heat from the generator will both warm the
offices and power a refrigeration plant to cool them.
Far away in Traverse City, Mich., a resort town four hours north of
Detroit, home builder Lawrence Kinney wrestles with a different problem,
people who want 6,000-square-foot vacation houses they will use only a
couple of weeks a year. Outraged by the waste, he refuses to build them.
His preferred size is about 1,800 square feet, 25 percent smaller than
the national average; he has rediscovered the virtues of plaster walls
instead of resource-intensive drywall, uses lumber harvested locally by
horse-drawn teams and treats his wood with stains made from plants, not
petroleum. When Jeff Martin, a program manager for Microsoft, set out to
build a sustainable house near Charlotte, N.C., he specified something
that looked like a house, not "a yurt, or a spaceship, or something made
out of recycled cans and tires in the middle of the desert." He turned
to Steven Strong, a Massachusetts-based renewable-energy consultant who
says he "fell in love" with solar energy when he realized that "you
could put a thin sliver of silicon, with no moving parts and no waste,
in the sun and generate electricity forever." Strong designed an
unobtrusive solar-cell array on the roof of Martin's conventional
stucco-and-stone house to provide free electricity, and a sun-powered
heater that produces so much hot water Martin can use it to wash his
driveway. "We never run out," Martin boasts, "even when my wife's family
comes to visit over Christmas."
The sun: sustainable energy that not even in-laws can exhaust! The same
sun that for years shone uselessly on the roof of FedEx's immense
Oakland airport hub, through which passes most of the company's traffic
with China. Since last year, solar panels covering 81,000 square feet
have been providing 80 percent of the facility's needs. The sun that
also creates the wind that powers the wind turbines that Chicagoâwhich
is seeking to be known as the environmental city as well as the
windy oneâis building atop the Daley Center, a high-rise courthouse.
But among cities, few are as sustainable as Austin, Texas, which
recycles its trash so assiduously that residents generated only 0.79
tons of garbage per household last year, down from 1.14 tons in 1992.
Austin's city-owned electric company estimates that "renewable" power,
mostly from west Texas wind farms, will account for 6 percent of its
capacity this year, nearly doubling to 11 percent by 2008. Beginning in
2001, customers were allowed to purchase wind power at a price
guaranteed for 10 years. But since it was more costly than conventional
power, most people who signed up did so out of convictionâuntil last
fall, when rising natural-gas prices meant that conventional customers
were paying more, and suddenly the company was overwhelmed with new
converts to sustainable power.
Another thing the sun does, of course, is grow plants. Agriculture is
being reshaped by the growing demand for corn to produce ethanolâwhich
can be blended with gasoline to stretch supplies, or can power on its
own the growing number of "flex-fuel" cars. Four billion gallons will be
produced this year, a doubling just since 2003. Dave Nelson of Belmond,
Iowa, now devotes as much land to growing corn for fuel as for
foodâthe same varietyâand after the starch is extracted for
fermentation, the protein left behind gets fed to his pigs, which
produce manure to fertilize the fields. "Not a thing is wasted," says
Nelson, who is chairman of a farmer's cooperative that runs one ethanol
distillery and is building another. The problem, though, is that people
and livestock eat corn, too, and some experts see a time, not too far
off, when the food and fuel industries will be competing for the same
resources. Biotech companies are scrambling to come up with processes
for getting ethanol from celluloseâthe left-behind stalks and leaves
of the corn plant, or other species such as switch grass that can grow
on marginal land. One can envision vast farms devoted to growing fuel
transforming the Midwest.
Even Wal-Mart wants to help shape a sustainable future, and few
companies are in a better position to do so. Just by wrapping four kinds
of produce in a polymer derived from corn instead of oil, the company
claims it can save the equivalent of 800,000 gallons of gasoline.
"Right-sizing" the boxes on just one line of toysâredesigning them to
be just large enough for the contentsâsaves $3.5 million in trucking
costs each year, and (by its estimate) 5,000 trees. Overnight, the giant
retailer recently became the largest purchaser of organic cotton for
clothing, and it will likely have a comparable impact on organic produce
as well. This is in line with CEO H. Lee Scott's goal of reducing the
company's "carbon footprint" by 20 percent in seven years. If the whole
country could do that, it would essentially meet the goals set by the
Kyoto treaty on global warming, which the United States, to the dismay
of its European allies, refuses to sign.
Wal-Mart's efforts have two big implications. One is cultural; it helps
disprove the canard that environmentalists are all Hollywood stars.
Admittedly, some of them are, like "Entourage" star Adrian Grenier,
whose renovated home in Brooklyn will have wall insulation of recycled
denim, or Ed Begley Jr., who likes to arrive at show-business parties
aboard his bicycle and markets his own line of nontoxic, noncaustic,
biodegradable, vegan, child-safe household cleansers. (Begley concedes
that "there are some insincere people in this community" who may have
latched onto the environment because Africa was already taken, but, he
says, "even if you're only into this cause for a week, at least you're
doing something positive for that week.") But it wasn't movie stars who
snapped up 190,000 organic-cotton yoga outfits at Sam's Club outlets in
10 weeks earlier this year.
And even as "green" products make inroads among Wal-Mart's
budget-conscious masses, they are gathering cachet among an affluent new
consumer category which marketers call "LOHAS": Lifestyles of Health and
Sustainability. "The people who used to drive the VW bus to the co-op
are now driving the Volvo to Whole Foods," exults David Brotherton, a
Seattle consultant in corporate responsibility. Brotherton estimates the
LOHAS market, for everything from organic cosmetics to eco-resort
vacations, at up to $200 billion. This is the market targeted by AOL
founder Steve Case, who has poured much of his fortune into a "wellness"
company called Revolution (it will own eco-resorts and alternative
health-care ventures), and by Cottages and Gardens, a publishing company
that is launching an upscale sustainable-lifestyle magazine in September
called Verdant (a chic synonym for "green"). Their younger counterparts
get their green news from places like Grist.org, whose founder, Chip
Giller, sees the site as participating in a "rebranding of the
environmental movement" away from preachiness and toward creating jobs,
enhancing national security and having fun.
The second effect of Wal-Mart's entry into environmental marketing is to
give eco-awareness the imprimatur of the world's most tightfisted
company. "If they meet their [20 percent] goal," says Jon Coifman, media
director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, "it's going to
demonstrate irrefutably that reducing your carbon footprint is not only
possible but financially efficient." Andy Ruben, Wal-Mart's vice
president for "strategy and sustainability," said the company had
assumed that certified organic cotton would cost 20 to 30 percent more
than the ordinary kind, grown with pesticides and synthetic fertilizer.
But when its representatives actually talked to farmers, they found the
organic cost about the same. Within five years the company intends to
sell fish only from certified sustainable fisheries in the United
States. Wal-Mart, Ruben says, plans on being in business a long time,
and it wants fish to sell.
Wal-Mart also has been on the defensive over the way it treats its
employees, suppliers and competitors, which may play a role in its
desire to be seen as a good corporate citizen. But to give it the
benefit of the doubt, it's run by people, and they have children, too.
It seems as if American business must be filled with midlevel executives
like Ron Cuthbertson, senior vice president of supply chain and
inventory management for Circuit City, who dutifully justifies each of
the chain's environmental initiativesâsubstituting reusable bins for
cardboard shipping boxes, establishing consumer battery-recycling
centers and so onâin bottom-line terms, but then can't help adding: "I
personally have a passion for this." It can almost be described as a
struggle for the soul of American business, which might help explain why
a top corporate executive once showed up in the office of Paul Anderson,
chairman of Duke Energy Corp., to perform a mock exorcism. Anderson is
an outspoken advocate for controlling greenhouse-gas emissions, and his
fellow CEO suggested he must have been possessed by the spirit of an
environmentalist. Some other CEOs, Anderson says, will agree with him in
private but hide their feelings in public. "Part of it," he muses, "has
to do with how close someone is to retirement: they think, if I can just
get through the next few years without addressing this."
In assessing Anderson's soul, it should be noted that his company is
particularly heavily invested in nuclear power, an alternative to
fossil-fuel plants that produce no greenhouse gases, so his concern for
the Earth happens to coincide with his company's interests. So much the
better for him, compared, say, with Ford chairman Bill Ford Jr., a
strong environmentalist who almost alone among auto executives concedes
that cars contribute to global warming. Yet Ford has struggled to impose
his views on the industry, or even the company that bears his name. He
turned the historic River Rouge plant into one of the most
environmentally sound factories in the world, at a cost of $2 billion.
But Ford has had to back away from a promise to improve gas mileage on
its SUVs by 25 percent and to increase hybrid production to 250,000
vehicles by the end of the decade. The company, which loses money on
hybrids despite their higher sticker price, said it would join the other
two U.S. carmakers in making more flex-fuel cars instead.
DaimlerChrysler just announced that it will begin importing its Smart
microcar from France, a vehicle just nine feet long that gets up to 69
miles per gallon. "Putting a product like Smart in the marketplace,"
says Reg Modlin, director of environmental and regulatory planning,
"shows that we're trying."
Looked at one way, these are thrilling times, the beginning of a
technological and social revolution that could vault our society into a
post-post-industrial future. "If you mention green tech or biotech in a
presentation," says Lane, the venture capitalist, "you'll get your
funding before you get to your third slide." On the other hand, we may
just be kidding ourselves. Can bicycles and switch grass really
offset the effectsâin pollution, resource depletion and habitat
destructionâof a billion Chinese lining up to buy cars for the first
time? Domestic oil production has been declining for years, and the
United States now imports 60 percent of the 20 million barrels it uses
every day. It's nice that Jane Cremisi, a mortgage consultant in Newton,
Mass., washes and reuses her aluminum foil and patronizes ecofriendly
hotels like the Lenox, in Boston, which composts its food waste. Or that
Melinda MacNaughton, a former dietitian from El Granada, Calif., cleans
her house with vinegar and baking soda. But you cannot save the world
with anecdotes. Is the relevant statistic that sales of hybrid cars
doubled last year to 200,000âor that they were outsold by SUVs by a
ratio of 23-1?
Still, when you look at all the United States has accomplished, can the
challenge be so far beyond us? Marty Hoffert, emeritus professor of
physics at New York University, doesn't think so. "If the United States
became a world leader in developing green technology and made it
available to other countries, it could make a big difference. For $100
billion a year, which is at least what we're spending on Iraq," it could
be done, he says. "People understand the urgency," says Fred Krupp,
executive director of Environmental Defense, "and they see the economic
opportunities." It will take political will, though, and in that sense
every mile Howell rides on her bicycle achieves more than it saves in
petroleum; it raises consciousness and awareness. And it will have to
enlist people like Steven F. Hayward, resident scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute. "There's no problem environmentalists can't turn
into an apocalyptic crisis," says Hayward (who agrees that the Earth is
warming but thinks civilization is likely to survive it). Yet of all
things, this hardheaded acolyte of the free market worries most about
species extinction, among the most rarefied of ecological concerns. But,
you see, Hayward has a young daughter. And she wants to be a zookeeper
when she grows up.
With Jessica Ramirez, Karen Springen, Brad Stone, Karen Breslau, Keith
Naughton, Jamie Reno, Ken Shulman, Matthew Philips, Staci Semrad,
Margaret Nelson, A. Christian Jean, Andrew Murr and Jac Chebatoris
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13768213/site/newsweek/
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