Greenest Show on Earth: Democrats Tackle Politically Correct Convention

Front Page WSJ points out the challenge of hosting a 50,000 political spectacular Democratic party event that is politically correct.  Can they host a Green event and succeed without being attacked for their practices?  We will see.

The Greenest Show on Earth:
Democrats Gear Up for Denver

From Organic Fanny Packs to 'Pure' Trash,
Party Planners Face Logistical Nightmare

By STEPHANIE SIMON
June 25, 2008; Page A1

DENVER -- As the Mile High City gears up to host a Democratic bash for 50,000, organizers are discovering the perils of trying to stage a political spectacle that's also politically correct.

Consider the fanny packs.

With biodegradable balloons and organic snacks, Denver Democrats hope to stage the "greenest convention" ever. See examples.

The host committee for the Democratic National Convention wanted 15,000 fanny packs for volunteers. But they had to be made of organic cotton. By unionized labor. In the USA.

Official merchandiser Bob DeMasse scoured the country. His weary conclusion: "That just doesn't exist."

Ditto for the baseball caps. "We have a union cap or an organic cap," Mr. DeMasse says. "But we don't have a union-organic offering."

Much of the hand-wringing can be blamed on Denver's Democratic mayor, John Hickenlooper, who challenged his party and his city to "make this the greenest convention in the history of the planet."

Convention organizers hired the first-ever Director of Greening, longtime environmental activist Andrea Robinson. Her response to the mayor's challenge: "That terrifies me!"

At first I felt sorry for the environmental activist Andrea Robinson, and decided to look up her background as an activist.  I found her acting list  http://www.us.imdb.com/name/nm0732365/ with appearances on CSI Miami, Joey, Doc, West Wing, Star Trek Deep Space Nine, ( there are 24 entries)

Then I went to the Democratic Committee web site. http://www.demconvention.com/meet-the-green-team/.

Meet the Green Team

Andrea Robinson
Director, Sustainability & Greening

Andrea is the first person to ever hold the position of “Director of Greening” for the DNCC and began creating the sustainability plan in September 2007.  She is responsible for constructing, developing, and managing the sustainability and greening efforts for the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

Andrea works with all DNCC Convention venues, departments, construction and production teams to adopt and implement environmentally responsible practices in all aspects of the convention planning and restoration phases. She serves as the Co-Chair of the Denver Mayors Energy Task Force and Denver Mayors Waste Minimization Task Force and works closely with the City of Denver and DNCC venues to create a long-term legacy of sustainability in Denver before, during and after the Convention.

With more than 25 years in the environmental field, Ms. Robinson has a long history of greening large scale events, developing corporate sustainability practices, championing renewable energy, endangered species & habitat protection issues for political campaigns and creating waste diversion and reduction programs. Most recently, Robinson managed the greening of the New York, Shanghai and Johannesburg venues for Vice President Al Gore's Live Earth Concerts for the Climate Crisis, the largest musical event in world history. At Live Earth, she also single-handedly built and managed relationships with over 650 international non-profit, intergovernmental and civil society organizations focused on solving the climate crisis. She has worked extensively with a variety of environmental non-profit organizations, including the Sierra Club and Environment Colorado.  Ms. Robinson received her degree in Environmental Science from University of California at Santa Barbara with an honors thesis on Biodiversity and the United Nations Earth Summit.

I don’t see how she has 25 years of experience given she started acting in 1995 on Baywatch Nights.  But, hey this must be part of being an actress.  She started her environmental work when she was 12. She did work for Al Gore, and he did invent the Internet. :-)

She does have some learning on how long it takes for a product to biodegrade. Was she paying attention to her science courses as part of her environmental studies degree?

To test whether celebratory balloons advertised as biodegradable actually will decompose, Ms. Robinson buried samples in a steaming compost heap.

…

But remember those balloons? She checked the compost heap last week -- and found them still intact. She has added more liquid to try to get them to degrade.

And if they don't? "The balloons will be there," she promises.

The convention's greening gurus say they're doing the best they can with the most current information available.

Can you claim lack of information as an excuse?

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Green (Resource Efficient) products are more competitive with rising energy prices

WSJ has a few interesting articles on Green efforts winning vs. other industries due to the fact that Green strategies uses less resources. In this article they make the point that energy intensive products are increasing in prices faster than Greener products.

Green Products Gain
From New Price Equation

They Find New Buyers
As High Energy Costs
Hurt Regular Brands

By ARDEN DALE

Does it finally pay to go green?

Consumers typically have paid a premium for environmentally friendly products. But with soaring energy prices pushing up the price of mainstream goods, green products are becoming just as -- or even more -- affordable these days.

The reason is that environmentally friendly products usually have less fossil-fuel content than competing nongreen brands. Their manufacture also tends to consume less oil, since green entrepreneurs favor renewable-energy and energy-saving practices.

TerraCycle Inc.

A TerraCycle bag made from juice pouches

The new price parity -- and, in some cases, advantage -- is allowing businesses to draw in the growing ranks of consumers who want to go green, but have so far resisted because of the higher cost. It also is giving some companies incentive to branch out into other eco-friendly products and even adopt more energy-saving manufacturing techniques.

"We try to leverage situations like this to grow into new markets," says Jeff Mendelsohn, founder and chief executive officer of New Leaf Paper LLC, a maker of recycled paper. "Where there's instability in prices, buyers tend to be more open to new sourcing, and that's a general market strategy, not just green."

This same phenomenon will occur in data center operators.  The Greenest data centers are going to be more competitive as energy costs increase.

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Green (Resource Efficient) Food winning vs. Organic

WSJ has a few interesting articles on Green efforts winning vs. other industries due to the fact that Green strategies uses less resources. This article compares Monsanto an engineered food company which claims it is 30% more efficient in using land, water, and energy to produce food than other food.  The article then goes on to compare the stock price of Monsanto vs. Whole Food.  Monsanto is the winner.

Food Shortage Recasts Image of 'Organic'

By KAREN RICHARDSON
June 25, 2008

The salad days of organic salad are wilting in favor of high-tech tomatoes.

As global food shortages threaten to ignite social and economic instability from Nigeria to India, the popular aversion to genetically modified foods is turning into more of a luxury for the wealthy than a practical option for the masses.

This trend is evident in the share price and earnings growth of Monsanto, the world leader in agricultural biotechnology by market share. Its stock has soared 22% this year, trading at a breathless 37 times estimated 2008 per-share earnings. On Wednesday, the company is expected to report a third-quarter profit of $1.39 a share, up 35% from a year earlier.

Gourmets' fears of "frankenfoods" that make corn taste like cardboard seem to be taking a back seat to the growing global demands of feeding emerging middle classes in developing countries with limited natural resources.

Monsanto's seeds produce insect-resistant, drought-tolerant crops. It has pledged to double crop yields by 2030 for corn, soybeans and cotton and to reduce the need for water, land and energy by 30%, an effort to position itself as a solution to concerns about mounting strain on the globe's natural resources.

The firm is in a strong position. Farmers who want to raise their yields of corn for feed or ethanol have to pay the price, while buyers of that corn have to eat it. Monsanto has already increased its earnings outlook several times this year because of demand and higher prices.

It stands in stark contrast to Whole Foods Market, the supermarket for all things organic. It is a price taker that can't easily pass higher costs to its customers. From 2001 to the end of 2006, the company's earnings grew an average annual rate of 25%. In 2007, earnings were down more than 10%, and they're falling further.

Engineered food is clearly getting an upper hand.

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Information Week tours Microsoft’s San Antonio Data Center under construction

Information Week was given a tour of Microsoft’s San Antonio data center under construction.

Seeding The Cloud

Posted by J. Nicholas Hoover, Jun 20, 2008 02:39 PM

Recently, I got the chance to visit one of Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s mega data centers for a tour while it was under construction. I'll just say this: creating the infrastructure needed for cloud computing isn't child's play.

Microsoft rolls out data centers as if they were aircraft carriers in the United States Navy. There's the Quincy-class, there's the Dublin-class, and there's the Chicago-class. I myself was at the Quincy-class San Antonio location, a monstrous ship of the online if there ever was one at 475,000 square feet.

And that's only one of the numerous (Microsoft won't give a number) $500-million-or-so data centers the company's got under construction or up and running around the world. With all that going on, Microsoft's got to have a plan in place to figure out when and where to build.

The company uses what Microsoft data center services general manager Mike Manos calls a "continuum strategy." It starts with Microsoft mapping out the world to identify the company's important data center markets. From the maps, Microsoft (duh) determines where new data centers are needed.

There isn’t anything new in this article that hasn’t been reported on previously. But, Microsoft gained more eyes and the writer speculates on the software + services strategy.

P.S. For all of those who read this and say, OK, but what is Microsoft going to use this ridiculous amount of server energy for, check here for more, starting on Saturday. Remember that top Microsoft execs have said that almost every Microsoft product will have a services component or a version delivered as a service going forward, and that Microsoft execs also have hinted at the possibility of utility computing services a la Amazon Web Services. That's a lot of Windows Servers, SQL Servers, and so on. You can be sure that come the end of October, you'll know a lot more.

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Google gets an F, Chevron A+ on California Sustainability Report

With the kids out of school, Environmental Leader wrote.

Chevron ‘A+,’ Google ‘F’ In Sustainability Reporting Efforts

An analysis of the social responsibility reporting efforts of California’s largest corporations finds that some, like Chevron, Hewlett-Packard and Walt Disney, publicized their sustainability on their Web sites, while others, like eBay, Google and Apple, rarely mentioned the subject, if at all.

The 132-page report, “Analysis of Sustainability Reporting of Fortune Companies in California” (PDF), produced by the Roberts Environmental Center of Claremont McKenna College, contains a compilation of Pacific Sustainability Index scores evaluating the environmental and social reporting of all California companies on the 2006 Fortune 1000 list. It scores companies based on the reporting, intent and performance of environmental and social sustainability efforts and is the center’s the first geographically based analysis of corporate reporting.

While the center’s scoring sheet contains only topics it thinks all companies should report on, not everyone agrees with the results, writes the center’s director J. Emil Morhardt.

. . . Sarah Bulgatz, Director, Corporate Public Relations, The Charles Schwab Corporation, took strong exception to our comparison of her company with manufacturers and refiners. We have printed her comments (with her permission) as a guest editorial on page 43, along with details of why we gave her company a grade of D+ for environmental and social reporting.

Morhardt says the center wants to encourage socially responsible companies to be more vocal about their efforts, and encourage those that have not addressed sustainability issues to do so.

From the actual report page 66.

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