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1. Use LED holiday lights
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2. A greener free market
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3. Holiday gift selection now online
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4. Obama stays the course on climate
Use LED holiday lights
Conservation tips
by Pete Davies
LED lighting is improving all the time, but it’s not yet advanced enough to be able to replace CFLs as a standard for low-energy lighting around the home. One place you can definitely use LED lights is for decorating your house and/or Christmas tree this holiday. This year we’re selling LED holiday lights in our green store.
How this helps
The bulbs can last up to 50,000 hours (that’s over five years of continuous lighting — no more tweaking every bulb trying to find the dud!) and use up to 90% less energy than standard incandescent bulbs. One estimate puts the potential savings at over $8 for just one tree’s worth of lights!
More information
- Buy some from the TerraPass store
- Recycle your old lights
Related tips (from GreenYour.com)
- Choose eco-friendly gift-wrapping and cards
- Choose a real Christmas tree
- Buy energy-saving and environmentally friendly gifts
A greener free market
Society
by Mark Mondik
With the recent financial market meltdown and related bailout, the term “free market” is not particularly in vogue at the moment. Instead, everyone seems to be looking for government intervention to force companies to do not only what’s right, but what in many cases is in the best interest of those companies.
Much of such regulation is probably necessary. Corporate managers are notorious for focusing on short-term profits, even if it comes at the expense of the longer-term future. And who can blame them? Executive compensation is almost always tied to short-term — or at the most medium-term — success. Unfortunately, this spells major disaster for our environment, which tends to show the effects of today’s behavior many years from now, by which time a corporate executive will most probably have changed jobs multiple times. So our only hope is to sit back and wait (stretch, yawn) for the government to step in.
Or is it? It turns out that not everyone is waiting for government intervention. A group of activist investors (and by investors, I’m talking about the people who have the greatest interest in bigger corporate profits) realized years ago that climate change poses a major threat to long-term corporate profits. As a result, the Investor Network on Climate Risk has decided to start policing companies on its own given the slowness of government action in this area.
With a membership of 70 institutions managing over $7 trillion in assets, INCR has catalyzed a growing movement within the asset management industry. This movement is aimed at (among other things) measuring the impact of climate risk on the long-term profit potential of corporations, and prioritizing investments in companies that score well in this measurement.
Another firm, Innovest, has started to rate companies based upon their exposure to climate risk and their ability to manage or mitigate that risk. Such ratings are intended to increase (or decrease) investor interest in such firms, as the ratings reflect the likelihood that a particular firm’s profits will rise or fall in the future due to climate change.
These developments represent a major breakthrough in private sector thinking in this area. Environmentalism was once the enemy of corporate profits, with most companies acting to reduce their environmental impact only because they were forced to by government. But with the leadership of groups like INCR and Innovest, many corporate executives will find themselves confronted by angry shareholders if they don’t start taking a more pro-active approach to addressing climate change.
Holiday gift selection now online
News
by Erik Blachford
We’ve done our best to put together a range of gift ideas, at a range of price points. As you would expect, we’re mostly interested in gifts that reduce carbon emissions, though this year we’ve included more stuff that falls into the “just for fun” category (not that reducing carbon emissions isn’t fun!).
So whether you are looking for a stocking stuffer like our USB Rechargeable Batteries (for the road warrior in your life - recharge those AA’s directly from a laptop USB port) or a more substantial gift like the Thames and Kosmos Wind Power kit (kids can build their own mini-wind turbine at home, and learn the science underneath the power generation) or a more delicious gift like Climate Change Chocolate (which includes 133 pounds of carbon offset, to balance out the daily carbon emissions of the average American adult), we’ve likely got something worth a look.
Let us know whether there are other things you think we should be offering, and of course feel free to use the reviews area under each product to let us know what you think about the products.
Obama stays the course on climate
Politics
by Adam Stern
This is welcome news to those who worry that the financial crisis will push climate policy down on the Obama Administration’s list of priorities. It also brightens the picture after Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) left participants at a carbon markets conference in Washington last week discouraged about the prospects for passing a climate bill in 2009.
Bingaman, who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said that it would still take more than a year for the House and Senate to sort through the complexity of economy-wide climate legislation. The influential senator also expressed skepticism about the role for offsets in any bill. Bingaman’s views seemed to have been shaped by news accounts of flawed offset projects, rather than the great majority of offset projects that deliver bonafide carbon reductions and lower the cost of reducing emissions.
The timing of U.S. action on climate policy is important in the context of U.N.-sponsored talks that seek to reach an agreement in Copenhagen in December 2009. If the U.S. isn’t ready to make commitments, negotiations among 170 countries could falter. President-elect Obama has taken a positive step forward with his remarks today.
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