As an undergrad at Brown University and a veteran organizer with the Sierra Student Coalition, Nathan Wyeth has his ear to the ground on campus sustainability issues. In this occasional column for Grist, Wyeth will report on what's afoot at the campus grassroots level and how he and his fellow students are making their voices heard.
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A debate has been swirling on Gristmill for the past few weeks over the role of voluntary actions versus government policy in solving climate change specifically, and environmental problems generally. I'd like to stir this pot further and add another ingredient -- what might be looked at as an in-between of sorts: social entrepreneurship.
Bill Clinton in the Atlantic Monthly touted a reinvention of charity, and Adam Werbach in Fast Company touted a reinvention of Wal-Mart. This whole social entrepreneurship thing is clearly "the new black." For the purpose of discussing it, I'll define social entrepreneurship as business that achieves profit through the delivery of public (social or environmental) goods.
I could tell that this was not just a media phenomenon after only a few days back on campus this fall.
At the Activities Fair the first week of school, a leader of the Entrepreneurship Club approached emPOWER, the climate-neutrality campaigners on campus, about partnering. And the Engineers Without Borders group came to emPOWER's first general body meeting to talk about working together.
Soon after, a housemate rested a foot on the empty keg sitting in our kitchen and told me about his idea for a business that would collect compost from households and sell it to farmers as fertilizer. Another housemate, talking over the gangsta rap pumping out of his iTunes, described a small-scale, methane-capture, waste-to-energy project he is working on. And a friend who worked with a nonprofit consulting firm over the summer is taking corporate finance this semester -- for all the right reasons. There's actually a whole class on social entrepreneurship, popular despite its 9:00 a.m. time slot.
It's difficult to make a blanket statement about the real and lasting impacts of business changes made as a result of the current media spotlight on the climate. Some companies are going to find new, innovative revenue streams and business models that are environmentally positive, but some are going to make, um, cosmetic changes, or worse, do nothing meaningful and call it something. But I think this social entrepreneurship craze is different, and potentially powerful.
I don't think that social entrepreneurial ideas and ideals, half-baked corporate do-goodery, old-fashioned greenwashing, or even better-organized markets for public goods -- as Clinton refers to in the Atlantic -- will replace or out-do regulatory structures and incentives in creating a new clean-energy economy. Rather, in order to build bedrock support for governmental climate action that grows rather than diminishes with time (even when they cause energy prices to go up, for instance), we need to -- in the words of a fellow leader on my campus -- "ground policies in reality by engaging people in tangible actions."
These actions can't be the small, voluntary suggestions that Mike Tidwell has argued end up taking the pressure off corporations and government. Even if these things are subtle psychological reinforcements of environmental values, as 22 psychologists wrote in response, they're the climate equivalent of giving change to a panhandler: taking pity on the climate and changing a light bulb, or being guilt-tripped into not eating meat. These are not the emotional pathways that lead to deep personal change or participation in political movements.
Instead, we need as many people as possible to take part -- as entrepreneurs, workers, volunteers, and more -- in the actual business of emissions reductions at institutional and community levels, so that they understand these actions as being means to personal goals of success and fulfillment. Once people imagine themselves serving their (perhaps even latent) environmental values through a successful career in whatever field they are drawn to, they'll be far more likely to follow this up with personal habits and political choices than to reach this through encouragement to engage in peripheral actions like recycling, or counterproductive actions such as buying a third car because it's a hybrid. Social entrepreneurship should not be viewed as free-market opposition by policy-oriented organizations, but a powerful means to deepen support for their cause.
So there's an important role for nonpolitical action to play in building a clean energy future, but it doesn't look like a list of tips from a "green issue" of a magazine. By getting engineers to audit buildings for efficiency, or having business majors compete in business-plan competitions judged on the basis of carbon emissions prevented as well as profits created, we're hoping on my campus to not only graduate people who attended a climate-neutral university, but who see stabilizing the climate as a central issue in their lives because of the careers that they hope to follow.
Climate-news poem: Breath-catching edition
Comments View as Flat
Pangolin Posted 7:04 pm
25 Sep 2007
College students invent wheel...
News at 11:00
The nice thing about being young is that you can really believe that sitting around a kitchen with your feet on a beer keg is research.
"Soon after, a housemate rested a foot on the empty keg sitting in our kitchen and told me about his idea for a business that would collect compost from households and sell it to farmers as fertilizer."
It's called waste stream reduction and a corp. called Waste Management (surprise) does it all over California. There's even a professional journal for landscape waste compost managers.
"Another housemate, talking over the gangsta rap pumping out of his iTunes, described a small-scale, methane-capture, waste-to-energy project he is working on.
Dairy farms have been doing this for over 20 years. Sierra Nevada Brewery just installed some massive methane to fuel cell with waste heat re-use systems. a
"And a friend who worked with a nonprofit consulting firm over the summer is taking corporate finance this semester -- for all the right reasons. There's actually a whole class on social entrepreneurship, popular despite its 9:00 a.m. time slot."
This might actually be useful. One of the biggest problems in installing energy efficiency projects is that purchasing credit at retail rates for these types of projects is cost prohibitive. A streamlined funding vehicle that rewards early adaptors is needed to facilitate installation of both green-power installations and efficiency retrofits.
Government support for doing something about climate change will appear when privileged people start losing their lives and assets to climate change effects. All measures currently on the table pale when compared to the sheer tonnage of coal shipped and burned daily. "Clean coal" is a transparent scam meant to fool the most gullible into approving subsidies for pollution and business as usual profits for utilities and the coal industry.
The college aged youth of america, taken as a group, are doing exactly bupkiss, nada, zero, nothing. If a tiny fraction of the energy expended in saturating your educated neurons in ethanol was committed to climate change solutions you would have a real brag to post instead of this nice little chat. How do I know? There is no national movement to provide cold, filtered, drinking water on college campuses instead of scattering plastic water bottles everywhere. Water bottle companies 22 brazillion; eco-students- zero.
What might show some engagement:
Campuses with plastic water bottle bans? (any?)
100 percent green-powered campuses? (zero? 1?)
100 percent geothermal heated/cooled campuses (zero?)
Car-free campuses- several
Bike free campuses- many (fix this)
Colleges getting the majority of food within 200 miles?
Colleges with student/faculty no-fly pledges?
So could you please connect the poli-sci students with the guys over in engineering and bio who have actual solutions and get some push to INSTALL THE SOLUTIONS. Oh, and learn to google a subject before you brag on your friends.
Your "signs of hope" I see as a pathetic lack of engagement and background knowlege. Prove me wrong.
Put the Carbon Back
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nedruod Posted 6:25 am
29 Sep 2007
Important, but not sustainable
The sustenance of entrepreneurship is profitability. Profits make garage ventures into publicly traded corporations. Profitability brings investment dollars necessary to go from a few kilowatts of generation to a few terawatts.
There are some overlooked opportunities that are good for the environment and conventionally profitable. But there are many more that are not conventionally profitable, or are at least less profitable than non-environmental possibilities.
Like the point I made in response to an EcoGeek post, about technology the sustenance of long term change toward environmentally profitable policies, is the inclusion of environmental effects in the profitability equation. The only option I know of to accomplish this, is legislation, preferably global, though national would be a good first step.
Without this change research investments, entrepreneurship, and personal actions will do more to benefit those who don't take them, then those who do. Not only is this not fair, and damaging to the motivation behind these valuable acts, but it has the insurmountable problem of slowly allocating more power, in the form of money, to those opposed to the good cause. This slow power drain makes policy, unless it incorporates environmental legislation, as unsustainable as the world damaging practices we are trying to change.
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Pangolin Posted 8:25 pm
29 Sep 2007
Trapped in the box.
When I read about climate change entrepreneurship I know that I'm reading the words of a bullshit artist. Climate change solutions require down to earth applications of old physics. People need food, water, shelter, transportation, health care and entertainment. They really don't need coal, oil, natural gas or a profit oriented economy to get those items.
All of the really big measures that could be taken to combat climate change are from your great-grandfathers tool bench. Electric rail, windmills, storm windows, bicycles, sail transport, straw-bale houses, crop rotation, coppicing woodlands, Terra Preta (pre-civilization in this case), cob houses. The list goes on and on.
It amounts to keeping a comfortable environment for humans with the least energy input from fossil fuels. That means doing non-entrepenurial work like energy remodels of every occupied building in the US, then the world. That's just not going to be profitable in the short run. It may provide jobs and wages but not "profit" in the modern sense.
It will be far cheaper to insulate our houses than to try and heat them with solar-photovoltaics. Its cheaper to drill wells and install millions of geo-exchange HVAC systems than to switch to a hydrogen economy or build nukes. It's cheaper to upgrade and expand light rail systems than to build millions of electric cars. It's cheaper to rotate your crops than to flood the fields with fossil-fuel fertilizer. This is all OLD tech right down to brewing your beer close to home rather than shipping water around the world. Demand destruction is cheaper than high tech "solutions."
The real problem is that none of the real solutions allow for exponential profit models. Physics says you cannot have "sustainable growth" if that definition means expanding your use of physical resources. You have to set limits to expansion. You have to promote stable communities with stable jobs and housing. You have to pay skilled labor real wages and treat them with respect. Climate change will not be solved within the current profit system. It has to go.
Put the Carbon Back
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nedruod Posted 6:41 am
30 Sep 2007
Can't leave the box if you don't know what it is
What makes you believe that this is non-entrepreneurial work? The definition of an entrepreneur is:
All of that work is, currently, high risk, because it is dependent upon long term paybacks
. If energy prices don't go up, or if regulations prevent costs from being recouped, than an investor is going to lose money. Also, in a historical sense, companies have made more money by avoiding these tasks.
I believe that is all changing, but to insure it does we need to make sure regulations support it.
Isn't this what I'm saying when I say "the inclusion of environmental effects in the profitability equation"? Or do you think we need to get rid of any system with:
Leaving the box involves more than lashing out at abstract terms like "corporate", "profit", "entrepreneur" and "government". At the very least you have to know what they are. Maybe they're trapped in the same box as you are. Maybe they're all trying to escape too.
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Jesse Jenkins Posted 8:38 am
13 Mar 2008
College Students Doing Natta, eh?
Pangolin, where the hell do you get off saying this: "The college aged youth of america, taken as a group, are doing exactly bupkiss, nada, zero, nothing."
Do you live in a cave, duck-taped to a moose with a solitary lightbulb swinging back and forth? Have you set foot on a college campus recently? Or if you prefer to not leave your cave (which apparently comes equipped with an internet connection at least), you could simply head on over here, here, or here and then tell me college students are doing "bupkiss, nada, zero."
Oh, and on bottled water, who do you think is doing the work on this campaign? Oh that's right, college-aged students and recent graduates are...
And just because a few students got a good idea that somebody else has already thought of doesn't mean you need to belittle every single college student's commitment to solving the climate crisis. You write on your blog "It's time for us to make a stand for our children and our planet." Good luck making that stand all on your own from your little cave in Northern California...
And thanks for your completely patronizing and dismissive comments.
Jesse Jenkins _____________________ WattHead - Energy News and Commentary http://watthead.blogspot.com
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