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CSRwire Weekly News Alert
7.22.2008 - 11:59pm ET
The Latest Corporate Social Responsibility News - Sterling Planet and Sustainable Business 20 Rise to Gore's Renewable Energy Challenge
Last week, Al
Gore wowed the world by announcing a bold "Challenge to Repower America"
with 100 percent renewable electricity within the next decade. Unlike
the media-hyped
Pickens Plan from oil baron T. Boone for supplanting oil dependence with
wind and … natural gas (a fossil fuel), Gore calls for a
comprehensive end to "our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels"
as a solution to economic, environmental, and national energy security
crises.
The challenge leapfrogs existing projections - for example, the recent Department of
Energy report on achieving 20 percent of electricity generation from wind
energy by 2030, and a joint Co-op America-Clean
Edge report on reaching 10 percent from solar by 2025. While this may
seem to undermine Gore’s goals, he points out that JFK's vision of
sending humans to the moon in a decade seemed impossible in May 1961, but
Neil Armstrong took his giant lunar leap a mere 8 years and 2 months after
Kennedy's speech.
Joining John McCain, Barack
Obama, Bill McKibben, and James Hansen in supporting Gore's Challenge
is the Center for Resource Solutions (CRS), the 10-year-old non-profit
behind Green-e, the
gold standard in verifying renewable energy and carbon emissions
reductions certificates. CRS points to the mutually
reinforcing benefits of committing whole-hog to renewables. For
example, building a clean energy infrastructure fuels good-paying
green-collar jobs that cannot be outsourced and relies on energy inputs
that do not need to be imported, all the while achieving carbon emissions
reductions necessary to avert catastrophic climate change.
Gore stressed that the Challenge requires a collaborative effort, building
on existing work. For example, Sterling Planet, which
offers Green-e certified renewable energy certificates and other carbon
offsets, just bought the first Voluntary Carbon Units (or VCUs) issued in
the US. The purchase supports the Greenville County (South Carolina)
landfill gas utilizations project in preventing the annual emission of
6,000 metric tons of methane (or 125,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide
equivalent) over the next decade. It is the first to be verified to the
Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS), a component of the Clean Development
Mechanism (CDM) framework under the Kyoto Protocol.
Gore also stressed the pivotal role of private investment in building a
clean energy economy. Pointing the way toward this kind of investment is
the seventh annual Sustainable
Business 20 (SB20) list of the "world's top sustainable stocks" from
SustainableBusiness.com. Chosen by a panel of experts in sustainable
investing such as Matt Patsky of the Winslow Green Growth Fund Andrew and
Andrew Brengle of KLD Research & Analytics, the list is comprised of more
than a third clean energy companies, such as First Solar and Solar
Millennium, as well as Suzlon in wind and the Climate Exchange
representing the new industry category of carbon markets.
About a million and
a half people already support Gore's Challenge, and the above
initiatives are among the pieces necessary to put in place for solving the
environmental, social, and economic crises facing us.
This article was written by CSRwire contributor Bill Baue.
CSRwire's Top Multimedia Picks of the Week
Reality TV, the green movement, and a couple of hard-living rockers
never looked so good. Check out Planet Green's newest show
Battleground Earth starring dueling foes Tommy Lee and Ludacris
As buzz builds around green certification, GreenBiz ran a great podcast
about one San Francisco law firm's year-long process to earn it.
The actor Michael Douglas hosts a new series that takes a look at
global poverty. "A Dollar A Day," features stories of people around
the world living in poverty.
Cornell University Chemist is using carbon dioxide to “green
plastic,” making it both more environmentally sound and
potentially cheaper than plastic made from petroleum.
Speaking of universities, last year the Aspen Institute Center for
Business Education surveyed MBA students at 15
business schools about their attitudes toward the relationship between
business and society. This is what they found.
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Jim Ehrlich
2008-07-23 12:36:30
Al Gore couldn’t wow anyone, much less the world. Sustainability will suffer because he is a buffoon. You should think about this if you are serious about advancing sustainable causes.
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