Grist Feed: Environmental Defense Fund

Climate Corps interns save Fortune 500 firms $54 million

Todd Woody — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:48:44 -0700

by Todd Woody
Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

Climate Corps. Photo: Environmental Defense FundBack in May I wrote about the Environmental Defense Fund's (EDF) Climate Corps, a cadre of 26 MBA students who were then prepping for summer internships at Fortune 500 companies. Their mission was to green up corporate operations to save money and cut carbon emissions.

With winter on the way and school back in session, I checked in to see how successful the Climate Corps was at combining the students' financial smarts, technological know-how -- half are engineers by training -- and environmental ethic.

Pretty successful, it turns out. According to EDF, the interns identified energy efficiency measures that will collectively save an estimated $54 million at 22 companies (and one university), including eBay, Dell and Sony Pictures Entertainment. That translates into 100,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases avoided a year with an annual energy savings of 160 million kilowatt hours.

A couple of caveats are in order. Energy efficiency programs were already under way at many of the companies. And whether the projected $54 million in savings will actually be realized won't be known until the energy efficiency efforts are completed -- actual results may vary.

Still, anything close to $54 million is quite a return on investment, given that the companies altogether spent only $260,000 on intern salaries during the 10-week program.

But the long-term payoff is likely to be the emergence of a new corporate class- - the green financial engineer -- and future CEOs -- who reflexively view environmental performance as a bottom-line concern.

"Many of these companies have people working on energy efficiency but it really helps to have another set of eyes on the ground," says Millie Chu Baird, the Climate Corps project director. "Even if a company thinks it's doing everything it can, we found often it can be doing more."

That was networking giant Cisco's experience. Last year, Climate Corps intern Emily Reyna made the business case for installing intelligent power strips in the company's labs to reduce electricity consumption. That will save an estimated $8 million annually with an 18-month payback period.

This year, intern Sarah Shapiro helped implement the power strip project while spearheading an initiative to cut power use by raising the ambient air temperature in the labs and in the chilled water that cools equipment. Projected savings? $1.8 million a year.

A Cisco manager had done a back-of-the-envelope analysis of such a project's potential, but it was Shapiro's job to gather the data to make the financial case for such an initiative.

"I spent a lot of time banging on doors and hanging out in data center to get the data," says Shapiro, who is pursuing dual degrees from the University of Michigan business school and its school of natural resources.

"Day to day there was a lot of talking to relevant people at Cisco, a lot of energy managers, human resources and workplace management," she added. "I worked a lot with energy folks to provide financial perspective on initiatives they were already working on."

And that's the missing link in a lot of corporate energy efficiency programs, according to Rob Rolfsen, who oversees Cisco facilities as director of workplace resources.

"Labs represent two-thirds of our carbon footprint," says Rolfsen. "Sarah brought a business side approach and could work with the engineers to develop a business case for what we wanted to do."

Shapiro's classmate, Ryan Whisnant, found that being a liaison between the gear heads and the number crunchers allowed him to exert influence in subtle ways. Posted to SunGard, a $5.5 billion software and IT services company headquartered outside Philadelphia, Whisnant went for a meet-and-greet with a facility manager and mentioned the lack of energy efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs in the building's lobby.

"The next time I came back I saw that CFLs were in the lobby," says Whisnant. "I found out that after our meeting the facility manager called and said to switch out the bulbs."

Whisnant spent most of his time developing energy efficiency measures for SunGard's corporate headquarters, such as retrofitting lighting, heating, and cooling systems.

"We built a whole financial model on a project-by-project basis in terms of lighting retrofits and to optimize building management systems," he says.

And it's not just forward-looking Silicon Valley-type tech companies that have embraced the Climate Corps. Among those cashing in on the interns' expertise: TXU, the coal-dependent utility once the bête noir of the environmental movement, supermarket chain Stop and Shop/Giant and even the NBA basketball team, the Houston Rockets.

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Ask Umbra’s video advice on sustainable seafood

Umbra Fisk — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 21:55:34 -0700

by Umbra Fisk
Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

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Todd Woody — Thu, 21 May 2009 00:01:10 -0700

by Todd Woody
Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

On the 28th floor of a San Francisco skyscraper, a cadre of 26 young men and women called the Climate Corps is being briefed. They won't be planting trees or serving as Al Gore's cap-and-trade shock troops.

Rather, these are MBAs on a mission to infiltrate the Fortune 500 and help them save ... money (and the planet too) by rooting out energy inefficiency and developing strategies to cut corporate carbon budgets.

The Climate Corps is an internship project of the Environmental Defense Fund, and I'm at EDF's San Francisco outpost as a three-day boot camp gets underway to train these green MBAs in such things as "HVAC Technologies and Efficiency Approaches" and "Energy Efficiency Option Identification & Evaluation Process." (And yes, they stayed wide-awake during those presentations.)

Once the interns are "embedded" at Cisco, Hewlett-Packard and 21 other companies for the summer, they'll go to work assessing ways to cut power consumption at data centers, corporate HQs and other facilities while doing the math to justify energy efficiency investments for the bean counters.

"The thing that is most exciting about what you're doing is the opportunity that you have to be the catalyst for change in the companies that you go to," Elizabeth Sturcken, EDF's managing director for corporate partnerships, tells the troops. "Some of these companies get it and others, they're trying to get it and that's why you're there."

The nuts and bolts of energy efficiency can be mind-numbing -- just sit through the "Lighting Lifecycle Cost Calculation" session -- but the bottom-line numbers are jolting: Office buildings in the United States account for as much greenhouse gas emissions annually as 43 coal-fired power plants, according to the Department of Energy. Corporations, meanwhile, spend $108 billion a year on their energy bills.

During the Climate Corps' inaugural run last summer, seven interns indentified $35 million in energy efficiency savings at their companies, EDF says.

Members of the Climate Corps' 2009 class of interns listen to a presentation from EDF's Millie Chu Baird.Courtesy of Environmental Defense FundWhich begs the question: why don't these wealthy corporations hire their own corps of energy efficiency experts?

Easier said than done, says Millie Chu Baird, the Climate Corps' project director. "We found there are a number of organizational and institutional barriers that prevent companies from embracing energy efficiency investments."

Mainly, the guys who keep the lights on don't talk to the gals who pay the bills, and no one wants to make more work for themselves or ask for money for capital improvements, especially at a time when the global economy it teetering.

Enter the tech-savvy MBA with dark green eyeshades who can bridge the gap between the two worlds. Half this year's Climate Corps members are trained engineers who didn't sweat solving boot camp exercises like, "How many gallons of gasoline equivalent would be saved every year by replacing a 60W incandescent light bulb running 4,000 hours with a CFL?"

"We thought why not MBA interns, future leaders?" says Baird "We can indoctrinate them and train them and they themselves can show companies that being good for the environment is good for the bottom line."

A green fifth column, in other words.

It may be a harbinger of a cultural shift that these once-future masters of the universe from A-list B-schools at Stanford, Yale and Columbia are choosing to put their financial smarts to work saving the universe -- while making a buck, of course.

"The sustainable finance class is really popular," says Ryan Whisnant, who's getting dual degrees from the University of Michigan business school and the school of natural resources. "People think it's really a strategic advantage to have an understanding of sustainability."

Whisnant will be embedded at the Wayne, Penn., headquarters of SunGard -- a $5.5 billion software and IT services company -- where he'll work on carbon foot-printing the corporate campus.

Jennifer Sweet, SunGard's senior manager for corporate responsibility, says she jumped at the chance to take on an intern dedicated to energy efficiency, especially one like Whisnant, who has a degree in environmental engineering. Like the other companies in the Climate Corps program, SunGard will pay Whisnant's salary during the internship.

That's a sweet deal for Sweet. "This is the kind of consultant that would cost $80,000 to $100,000 for three months," she says.

"This is a phenomenal opportunity to get an idea of what we need to do and spread that to all our other offices," adds Sweet, who is the sole full-time employee among SunGard's 21,000-person workforce dedicated to sustainability issues. "Sustainability is really pushed heavily from our CEO and our board and from the grassroots," she says. "Hopefully, we'll be pushing the center to get the operations mangers to make changes."

Last summer, Emily Reyna was one of 15 MBA candidates dispatched to Silicon Valley networking giant Cisco Systems by the University of Michigan, but she was the only one working on energy efficiency. She spent her internship devising ways for Cisco's R&D laboratories to cut their energy use.

She discovered that a Cisco lab in North Carolina had installed intelligent power strips to turn off equipment when idle, resulting in a 25 percent cut in electricity consumption. She spent the summer talking to lab managers and studying the financial implications of rolling out the devices to all of Cisco's 1,000+ labs.

"As an MBA going in, you're working with facilities people or energy managers and they don't think you're credible," say Reyna. "But being able to really dig into the numbers and make the case is what's valuable about the program because they often don't have time do it."

A Climate Corps MBA candidate from the University of Michigan will continue her work this summer, Reyna says, as Cisco launches a pilot project to test the power-saving gadgets at three labs.

Watch a short EDF promotional video about the Climate Corps program:

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EPA’s climate finding ticks off industry, energizes enviros and congressional leaders

Jonathan Hiskes — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 12:56:17 -0700

by Jonathan Hiskes
Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

Here come the reactions ...Grist’s Kate Sheppard has a great story on today’s big news, the EPA decision that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare:

The long-expected finding, set in motion two years ago by a Supreme Court ruling, moves the Obama administration one step closer to regulating CO2 emissions from a number of sources across the country. But it leaves unanswered questions about how the agency will go forward and which industries will be most affected.

The news set off a flurry of reactions from wary industry reps, gratified green groups, and eager politicians. Here’s a sampling.

Industry

The American Petroleum Institute is none too pleased:

The proposed endangerment finding poses an endangerment to the American economy and to every American family. It could lead to greenhouse gas regulations under a law fundamentally ill-suited to addressing the challenge of global climate change. The regulations could impose complex, costly requirements on restaurants, colleges, schools, shopping malls, bakeries and many other businesses and institutions.

Scott Segal, director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, which represents power companies, offered a similar warning:

While EPA's endangerment finding arises in the context of automobile emissions, the finding can have profound consequences for all industry in the United States. Over 20 different industrial sectors are heavily dependent on traditional fossil fuels, and many more rely upon the products, feedstocks and commodities created by those industries. The annual benefit of coal use alone has been estimated at more that $1 trillion in gross domestic product (GDP) and nearly 7 million jobs.

If reliance upon coal-fired generation were to diminish by a third as a result of EPA regulatory programs, GDP would be reduced by about $166 billion, household incomes by $64 billion, and employment by 1.2 million jobs. To the extent green jobs are created, they would come only after severe trauma to the economy and would likely be lower-paying than the manufacturing jobs they displace.

Those in our economy least able to afford it would unfortunately be hurt the worst. Americans living on fixed incomes, at or near the poverty level, pay a far greater percentage of their monthly income on energy bills.

Marlo Lewis, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

A more potent Anti-Stimulus Package would be difficult to imagine.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce opened its statement with a somewhat measured reaction:

“Today’s proposed finding shows that EPA is at a crossroads when it comes to greenhouse gases,” said Bill Kovacs, vice president for Environment, Technology and Regulatory Affairs at the U.S. Chamber. “In proposing endangerment without attaching regulations, the EPA recognizes that the framework of the Clean Air Act poses a unique set of legal and, ultimately, economic problems.”

“The motor vehicle title of the Act, under which this proposed finding is made, allows EPA the flexibility to phase in regulations while taking into account technological and economic considerations,” Kovacs continued. “The rest of the Act, however, does not—and a final endangerment finding will surely spur litigation to shoehorn all emitters, not just motor vehicles, into a wide range of Clean Air Act programs. The EPA therefore has a choice to make: it can proceed at a pace consistent with current and future technology, or it can allow non-governmental entities and activist groups to take the regulations out of EPA’s hands and apply the Clean Air Act through the courts. The second option would kill economic growth and jobs.”

No surprise, the National Association of Manufacturers said it opposes using the Clean Air Act to deal with CO2 emissions. The group said it was already on record as having...:

"...warned that using outdated programs under the CAA as a tool for regulating GHG emissions will further burden an ailing economy while doing little or nothing to improve the environment. Between 2000 and the first quarter of 2008, as many as 3.7 million jobs were lost in the U.S. in large part because of high energy prices. 'This proposal will cost jobs. It is the worst possible time to be proposing rules that will drive up the cost of energy to no valid purpose,' said NAM President John Engler."

Green groups

Environment America's Emily Figdor put her reaction in layman's terms:

'Duh' may not be a scientific term, but it applies here. Today, common sense prevailed over pressure from Big Oil and other big polluters to deny the obvious in order to maintain the status quo on energy. EPA has embraced the basic facts on global warming that scientists around the world have acknowledged for years. We applaud President Obama and EPA Administrator Jackson for putting science back in its rightful place at the forefront of environmental policy.

The Sierra Club met the news with a new “Big Picture” campaign, promising outright support for President Obama’s energy agenda:

"President Obama sees the Big Picture—by shifting to clean energy, and cracking down on the corporations that pollute the water we drink and the air we breathe, we can restore our economy to prosperity and reduce our dependence on oil and coal, all while tackling global warming," said Carl Pope, Sierra Club executive director.

Entitled "The Big Picture: Help Obama Build Our Clean Energy Future," the grassroots effort will employ online and off-line tactics to generate public comments and support for the numerous administrative findings, rules and regulations expected over the coming months and years.

Greenpeace, on the other hand, isn’t ready to break out the champagne and party hats. It’s gloomier take on the EPA’s finding begins “It’s about time,” and continues:

Today’s announcement is also a testament to the success of industry in delaying real action to stop climate change. It took eleven states, ten years, two IPCC reports, two changes of presidency and one Supreme Court decision to reach the obvious conclusion that global warming endangers human health and welfare and EPA has a duty to do something about it.

There is a clear lesson here for both the Administration and Congress as they craft a global warming bill this year: industry will exploit every ambiguity, every gap and every loophole in legislation to avoid real climate action as much and as long as possible. Fuzzy wording and big exemptions inserted to buy off industry support for a bill could delay real emission reductions for years or decades. The planet cannot afford that.

The Environmental Defense Fund issued a similar call for political vigilance:

The usual suspects that lobby to delay progress and avoid accountability continue to use scare tactics to claim that action by EPA will result in a "cow tax" and make other absurd claims. EPA is not even requiring reporting of greenhouse gas emissions for sources emitting less than 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually. To put the 25,000 reporting threshold into perspective, it is the amount of pollution emitted from the annual energy use of about 2,200 homes, approximately 58,000 barrels of oil consumed, or 130 railcars of coal.

Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, offered a warning to disgruntled business interests:

[I]f business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce continue to oppose congressional action [on climate change], they ought to ask themselves, in the immortal words of Clint Eastwood, "Do you feel lucky?"

The Obama administration now has the legal equivalent of a 44 magnum. The bullets aren’t loaded yet, but they could be.

Politicians

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), whose state has taken a lead in tackling climate change, praised the Obama admin for getting with the program:

[I]t's promising to see the new administration in Washington showing signs that it will take an aggressive leadership role in fighting climate change that will lead to reduced emissions, thousands of new green jobs and a healthier future for our children and our planet.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.):

I welcome the decision by the Obama Administration ... The Congress is working on a comprehensive solution to global warming, and I am committed to moving clean energy legislation this year that will include perspectives from across our nation to create jobs, improve our national security, and reduce global warming.

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which will begin hearings on the Waxman-Markey climate bill next week:

The EPA announcement confirms what science has told us -- global warming pollution poses a grave threat to the nation’s public health and welfare. EPA is legally compelled to take action and I commend them for complying with the law. However, I believe it is Congress that should create a comprehensive framework to combat global warming that will break our dependence on foreign sources of energy and help transform our economy with millions of new clean energy jobs.

Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), chair of the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee:

Today, the EPA concluded that our health and our planet are in danger. Now it is time for Congress to create a clean energy cure. Taking action on clean energy and global warming has a national security imperative, an economic imperative to create jobs, and now a clear legal and public health imperative.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee:

EPA, through its scientists, has given us a warning that global warming pollution is a clear, present and future danger to America’s families. If Congress does not act to pass legislation, then I will call on EPA to take all steps authorized by law to protect our families.

Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.), a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee:

The environment and public health won a big victory today. The science is clear on the serious threat posed by greenhouse gases and the need for swift action. Congress needs to follow EPA’s lead by placing science-based limits on greenhouse gases and putting Americans to work building a cleaner, more efficient economy.

Sen. James “global-warming-is-a-hoax” Inhofe (R-Okla.), ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee:

Today's action by the EPA is the beginning of a regulatory barrage that will destroy jobs, raise energy prices for consumers, and undermine America's global competitiveness. It now appears EPA's regulatory reach will find its way into schools, hospitals, assisted living facilities, and just about any activity that meets minimum thresholds in the Clean Air Act…

It's worth noting that the solution to this 'glorious mess' is not for Congress to pass cap-and-trade legislation, which replaces one very bad approach with another. Congress should pass a simple, narrowly-targeted bill that stops EPA in its tracks.

Heard more interesting reactions? Post ‘em below in comments.

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Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

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Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

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Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

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Grist — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 07:00:00 -0700

by Grist
Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

Environmental groups dropped their opposition to two different coal-fired power plant expansion projects in Wisconsin and Texas this week after the utilities agreed to a range of concessions designed to limit the environmental impacts of the plants. In Texas, power company NRG reached an agreement with Texas Clean Air Cities Coalition and the Environmental Defense Fund that requires the company to offset or sequester half of its carbon dioxide emissions until federal climate legislation is passed; cap the levels of mercury, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur dioxide the facility can emit; reduce the coal plant's use of water by over half, as well as other measures. In Wisconsin, the Sierra Club and Clean Wisconsin dropped their legal challenges to a coal-fired power plant's expansion in exchange for utility We Energies agreeing to retire two older coal plants in Michigan by 2012 and agreeing to support legislation increasing Wisconsin's renewable-energy standard to 25 percent by 2025. "We've been fighting for more than seven years ... It's time to put this [plant] behind us and focus on the other ones that are in the pipeline," said Bruce Nilles of the Sierra Club.

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by Fred Krupp
Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

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Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

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by Grist
Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

The Environmental Defense Fund has produced a new report highlighting processes, products, and technologies that are making the biz world more eco-friendly. The green group's Innovations Review 2008 draws attention to developments good for both business and the environment. The report focuses specifically on innovations on the cusp: not yet widely implemented, but not still in the R&D phase. So what's on the horizon? Solar-power purchase agreements in the real-estate biz, data systems that help shipping fleets reach maximum efficiency, technological advances in teleconferencing, and much, much more.

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Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

Fred Krupp.

Fred Krupp has been piloting Environmental Defense Fund since he left private law practice in 1984. It hasn't gone badly: Under Krupp's leadership, the group has become an influential player in the deepest halls of power, with an annual budget that's ballooned from $3 million to $71.8 million.

A substantial measure of EDF's success and credibility stems from its crucial role in the development of the emissions trading program to reduce acid rain, passed in the 1990 Clean Air Act. Now Krupp is trying to replicate that success on a larger scale, stumping ceaselessly for passage of a cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

EDF's critics, many found in the activist and netroots wings of the green movement, say Krupp has become so fixated on playing kingmaker again that he's gotten too close to big business and too involved in insider politics. They cite EDF's vigorous support for the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, now making its way through the Senate, which aims for carbon targets weaker than most scientists recommend and includes a giveaway of up to $1 trillion to fossil fuel companies. (EDF responds that they are far from the only green group to express support for that bill.)

Earth: The Sequel, by Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn.

EDF backers note that Krupp was instrumental in pulling together the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of more than two dozen powerful American corporations pushing for climate legislation; they note that he played a key role in brokering the TXU buyout that spared Texas eight of 11 proposed coal power plants; they point out that he has the ears of people with whom most environmentalists could never get in a room.

Love or hate EDF's good-cop routine, it's difficult to maintain much angst around Krupp himself. He is solicitous to a fault and almost boyishly earnest, with an enthusiasm that comes across clearly in his new book Earth: The Sequel. Cowritten with journalist Miriam Horn, the book is a guided tour through the innovators, entrepreneurs, and technologies that are flourishing in the fight against climate change -- and stand to flourish on another level when a price is put on carbon. I spoke with Krupp in the Grist office.

There are lots of whiz-bang technologies in the book. If you were an investor, which one would you pick to make a material difference in the energy balance soonest?

I'm not sure I know the answer to that. One of the things I find so hopeful is that there's such a bouquet of alternatives. Solar energy has a lot of potential. I do think about what Bernie Karl's done in Alaska; this guy who owns a hotel becomes the first to make low-temperature geothermal work and now they are selling these units all over the world.

Hot water comes up with oil in a lot of oil wells. Normally the oil companies pay to separate it from the oil, but according to David Blackwell, a professor at [Southern Methodist University] down in Texas, there's enough hot water in these abandoned oil wells that by harnessing it for electrical power you could avoid the need for building 13,000 megawatts in power plants. (This country, in its wisdom, stopped putting money into geothermal research a few years ago.)

All of these technologies have been suppressed by the fact that our country has not put a legal limit on dumping global warming pollution into the air.

Did you find a particular technology niftiest, in a gizmo-fascination sort of way?

Quite a few things, from the solar energy innovations -- liquefying silicon to paint solar cells onto almost any surface -- to the innovations in the biofuels arena.

The biochemists who started Amyris are already saving the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation $200 million a year on the cure to malaria, by having yeast bioengineered to produce it. The idea that these guys have now set their sights on fossil fuel, I think that's exciting.

Verenium has now built this plant in Louisiana to change fiber into sugar and digest that. They've hired the former headmaster of Anheuser-Busch to brew stuff. And I was intrigued to learn they've merged with Diversa, a company with 60 scientists who have been bio-prospecting for a decade, looking for extremophiles because they will contain the enzymes key to making biofuels out of wood chips.

Everyone seems focused on new technology. What about the changes in policy and practice that could make a dent in the problem with existing technology?

Absolutely. We have existing, off-the-shelf technologies: everything from cars to compact fluorescents to energy-efficient TV screens. Part of the answer is going to be building a stronger environmental ethic and awareness to get the information out there. And part of having a policy that creates economic incentives for efficiency and conservation as well as for new technologies is that it lifts all these boats.

But I would also say this: the reductions we need are so huge that we're going to need a lot of the new technologies described in this book as well. Most scientists say the best we can hope for is to stabilize atmospheric concentrations [of carbon dioxide] at 450 parts per million, and it's on that basis that they calculate we'll need a 50 percent cut in emissions worldwide by 2050, with our country taking perhaps an 80 percent cut so that the formula works out.

We're at 380 parts per million. We're losing the polar ice caps. We're losing the glaciers. We go to 450, we're going to have lost every coral reef on earth. The idea that we should resign ourselves to that as a target is unacceptable. We've got to aim to stabilize greenhouse-gas emissions at today's levels or lower than today's levels, given the effects we're seeing at today's levels.

You are right, we need to deploy today's technologies, but we also need to drive innovation as fast as possible, because we're going to have to drive emissions down way faster than what even most scientists are now saying.

Almost all of the economic modeling that has been done on a cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gases shows energy prices rising and GDP growth slowing. That's the cudgel used against the policy. What's the answer to it?

These models have always been wrong. They have always underestimated the dynamism that occurs when government requires lower levels of pollution, especially when government uses a cap-and-trade system that introduces this incentive to hunt down the lowest-cost opportunities. They got it wrong by a factor of 10 in the acid rain debate.

Having said that, Nat Keohane, a great economist on our staff, looked at the six most prominent models and it turns out here's what happens: the pessimist models say that instead of the economy growing from today's levels to double today's levels by, say, January 1 of 2030, it takes until February, or maybe June or July for the most pessimistic models. Over 22 years the total cumulative hit -- according to the pessimists -- is 1 percent, maybe a percent and a half. It is trivial.

So one thing we need to do is point out that the models are always wrong, but two, point out that even if they are right, it is a trivial cost to pay to have a future on planet Earth.

Lots of green groups are for 100 percent auctioning of [pollution] permits under a cap-and-trade system, as are Obama and Clinton. Economists say 100 percent auction is the most macroeconomically efficient system. Against that tide is Duke Energy, a coal utility that has an immediate financial stake in getting credits allocated, and John McCain, who has taken the Duke Energy line. EDF has come down on their side of that debate. Why? Is it a matter of compromising to get a bill, or is there a substantive case for backing off 100 percent auctions?

On allocation, I'm not sure that our position is as you described. What I know we've said is that 100 percent auction makes a lot of sense. We have said we need to get to 100 percent auction over time and that we could understand starting with something less than that. In USCAP -- a coalition that includes NRDC, National Wildlife Federation, ourselves, and many businesses like GE and John Deere -- our common position is that a significant portion of the allowances should be distributed for free in the beginning, transitioning to a complete auction. We haven't said what "significant" is, or how fast.

I do think [Duke CEO] Jim Rogers has a point when he says that 95 percent of the electricity in Indiana is generated by coal, and if we want the cap to go into effect soon -- I'd like it to go into effect next year, or the year after -- they won't have the opportunity to retrofit their plants that quick. So if you could find a way to avoid windfall profits for the utilities -- and only if -- in a transitional period, the allocations would keep the electric costs lower for those consumers in Indiana.

Those are big ifs.

We will have to be convinced, as will you, that what happened in Europe, where there were windfalls, doesn't happen here. If we're not convinced of that, we won't be supportive.

Every year that we wait to put a limit on dumping into our atmosphere, we make the goal of stabilizing at today's levels or less tougher to achieve; we make the cost go up. So we do think it's unconscionable to wait if -- and only if -- we can get a strong bill sooner. The likelihood of getting a strong bill is going to be greater in 2009 than 2008; I would agree with that. But we owe it to our members and the American public and humanity to do everything we can to try to get a strong bill on the floor of the Senate now.

The international context plays into my thinking, because the world needs to conclude a new [climate] agreement in Copenhagen in December 2009, and one of the forces that should be there, pressing on the developing nations for the strongest possible agreement, is the United States. But until we enact a law, people laugh at us; they certainly don't listen to us. If we can pass a strong bill in 2008, we should; if not, we damn well better make it the first thing that happens in 2009.

What could happen to the Lieberman-Warner bill that would cause you to pull support? Is there a red line?

We think the existing draft is a strong bill. We'd like to see the 2050 goal strengthened to 80 percent [cuts in CO2 emissions], but that's not a live-or-die issue for us, because Congress is going to amend this goal 10 times between now and 2050. We're more focused on the near-term reductions. The fact that [Senate Environment Committee Chair] Barbara Boxer [D-Calif.], a strong environmentalist, was able to shepherd a bill that gets 20 percent reductions by 2020 is terrific. We want to see at least the 20 percent reductions by 2020, and we want to see them starting immediately.

So it's the urgency of action and the timetable and the level of the first reductions which will inform our judgment as to whether to continue to support this or pull our support.

What could a president do immediately, with executive power, without going past Congress?

We spend a billion dollars a day on oil, and our total research budget for renewable fuels in this country is a billion dollars a year. By executive action, the president could increase that research budget for renewable fuels. I'm not in favor of the government picking this winner or that winner -- that's how we got into this whole conventional ethanol mess -- but more research money for geothermal, solar energy, that would be appropriate.

Since Sept. 12 of 2001, America has been waiting for leadership. Americans have been waiting to be asked to do something about our tremendous expenditures on oil, and the fact that this money goes to hostile regimes. The first thing a president can do is talk about the patriotic responsibility we have to buy fuel-efficient cars and energy-efficient appliances. Ask people to come together and take the steps the American public should have been asked to do after Sept. 11. People are still ready and understand the need, if only they are asked.

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