Tag Archives: carbon emissions

Sustainable Business Leadership Graduation Ceremony – Cambridge

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Eleven Cambridge companies were certified as “Sustainable Business Leaders” on Thursday April 1, 2010, for completing the Sustainable Business Leader Program (SBLP)—a program of the Sustainable Business Network (SBN) that provides guidance, support and technical assistance to facilitate the “greening” of small and medium-sized businesses. The special certification ceremony, which was held at the Cambridge City Hall Annex, was co-sponsored by the City of Cambridge, Cambridge Local First and the Cambridge Energy Alliance in partnership with the Sustainable Business Network.

The first Cambridge graduating class included:

Cambridge Naturals, 1369 Coffee House, Veggie Planet, Stone Hearth Pizza, Irving House, Greenward, Harvest Co-Op Markets, Harvard Bookstore, The Fishmonger, Cambridge Brewing Company and Economy Hardware.

Graduates earned their SBLP certification by completing the rigorous six-step SBLP process and reducing their collective carbon footprint, plus they received window decals to demonstrate their leadership to the public.  Measurable and significant changes were identified and implemented in various areas, including Energy Efficiency, Water Conservation, Waste Reduction, Transportation Management, Pollution Prevention and Sustainability Management.  Many companies saw financial savings as a result of lowering consumption of energy and water and diverting their waste stream into recycling and compost.

Mayor David Maher was the first to congratulate the businesses, followed by Vice Mayor Henrietta Davis, Susanne Rasmussen, Director of Environmental and Transportation Planning and Energy, Lilah Glick of the Cambridge Energy Alliance and Rachael Solem of Cambridge Local First.

With over 60 participating companies, the SBLP continues to grow and assist small to medium sized businesses “green” their operations, collectively reducing their carbon footprint in Boston, Cambridge and Somerville.  The Sustainable Business Network of Greater Boston (SBN) launched the Sustainable Business Leader Program (SBLP) in 2008 through a partnership with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA). The objective of the SBLP is to provide guidance, support and technical assistance to facilitate the ‘greening’ of small and medium-sized locally owned businesses in Massachusetts.

Mind the gap.

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Bubble chart of CO2 emission per capita vs. GDP Gapminder is an organization dedicated to helping understand the world, and particularly environmental issues, by providing interesting tools for statistical analysis. They’re well-known for their Wonderbread-like bubble charts, and brief presentations by director Hans Rosling like the one at right on CO2 emissions from their “myth demolishing series.”

See also Worldmapper.

Interest in Global Warming Heats Up

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When you visit the New York times website on Sunday evening, the list of most emailed articles is usually topped by either the big news story of the day, a particularly relevant Frank Rich article or some pithy commentary from Maureen Dowd. This past Sunday  it was a 4,000 word article on noted academic Freeman Dyson, who has been comfortably employed as a big brain for over 50 years at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey.

29dyson1-500Why the sudden interest in a man now is his mid 80s?

Dyson has always been considered a contrarian. As one of his colleagues observed, “… when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip away at the ice.”

While Dysons’s latest idea is not quite as ‘out there’ as his contributions to the shuttered ‘Orion’ project (inter-galatic space travel powered by controlled nuclear bomb blasts) his latest opinion–that we might all be overreacting to global warming–has certainly captured the attention of the scientific community and the media.

Several years ago, Dyson attracted attention with his rather curious statement that global warming could be easily dealt with by developing ‘carbon eating’ trees. This idea was based on Dyson’s observation of carbon levels at various times of the year. In temperate climates–such as Cambridge, MA–the level of carbon particles  in the atmosphere are lowest in the fall. Assuming this coincides with the time of the year when trees and other vegetation are in full bloom and more equipped to extract carbon from the air, Dyson saw the possibility of geo-engineering a strain of trees that would perform this task more efficiently.

Recently, Dyson has been given to publicly wondering if global warming is all that bad and accusing Al Gore of being a ‘panic merchant’. The basis of his theory is our development from an agrarian economy to an post-industrial information-based society was powered by carbon-based energy, so how bad could it possibly be?

Warm Home Cool Planet finds it strange that a man of science is taking this position. Our progress as a civilization depends on our ability to develop and adapt new forms of technology that make our lives more convenient, more productive and safer. We discard old ways of doing things when something better comes along. How many people are sticking with a typewriter just because Hemingway wrote on one?

Carbon-based energy has been with us since the invention of the steam train. It is still relatively available and inexpensive–for now. We can already see a point where they will be neither. For the sake of our planet and future generations, it’s time our alternative sources of energy become our major sources of supply.