From GreenBiz.com

By Tilde Herrera
Published May 19, 2008

Behind the splashy headlines chronicling the corporate world’s embrace of all things green, a quiet revolution is taking place amongst the law firms that serve it.

Legal firms, which are enormous consumers of paper, are increasingly turning to green business practices to save money and natural resources, drive efficiency and align their values with existing clients — and companies searching for a sustainability-minded law firm. Now attorneys have a new law-specific resource called the Green Guide for Lawyers to help them minimize their environmental impacts.

“If you’re not attuned to these issues, you’re at a competitive disadvantage in my mind,” said David Scott, an attorney with Luper Neidenthal and Logan in Columbus, Ohio.

Scott served as chair of the Meritas Leadership Institute, which recently unveiled the Green Guide for Lawyers, a best practices handbook that follows in the footsteps of the American Bar Association-U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (ABA-EPA) Law Office Climate Change Challenge launched last year.

“You’ve got a small group of attorneys in the game and then there’s a greater body of attorneys that never think about these things,” Scott said.

Green Law

The greening of the corporate sector has picked up steam in recent years, and as those corporations attempt to improve their bottom lines and mitigate risk from impending federal environmental regulations, they turn to their legal teams for advice.

“It matters to clients,” Scott said. “What’s important to clients is important to attorneys.”

The emphasis on environmental and sustainability issues becomes more acute for those firms whose client lists tread heavily toward the green sector.

“We have a number of clients involved in green business,” said Adam Umanoff, a partner with the law firm of Chadbourne and Parke, which recently announced a corporate green initiative to curb paper consumption and tap into renewable energy. “Ignoring their concerns isn’t good business practice.”

Historically, lawyers entered the environmental realm in one of two ways, according to Josh Arnold, founder of the consulting firm 360GREEN Inc. in Madison, Wis. Arnold, who also earned a degree from Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., worked as an advisor for the Meritas Green Guide for Lawyers.

Attorneys could work for a nonprofit, or other organization on the “good side,” or they could work for a larger firm that represents polluters or those perceived to be on the “bad side.” But the concept of the triple bottom line — based on financial, social and environmental performance — has spilled into sectors that previously had no association with being green. These days, businesses across nearly every sector are addressing sustainability in some way.

“The old dichotomy of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ has gone away,” Arnold said. “Now you can do the right thing no matter what sector you’re working in. It becomes a way for attorneys to deliver additional value for clients, no matter who the client is.”

Law firms can position themselves as trusted business advisors if they can gain sustainability skills, Arnold said. With future regulations on the horizon and a likely cap-and-trade system that stands to turn some sectors into winners or losers, lawyers will be at the forefront of the transition to a low-carbon economy by making the case for their clients.

“They can provide a whole other set of counseling for clients,” Arnold said. “This counseling is well within the traditional parameters of attorney advice because it’s about risk management.”

A number of climate change law practices have sprung up around the country. For instance, Umanoff’s firm, Chadbourne and Parke has launched a climate change practice that is being led by former New York Gov. George E. Pataki and John Cahill, the former commissioner of the New York Department of Environmental Conservation.

Potential clients are showing more interest in how law firms are addressing sustainability, said Daniel Eisenberg, an attorney with the law firm Beveridge and Diamond who also works with ABA-EPA Law Office Climate Change Challenge.

“When a big company asks for firms’ request for proposals, they’re now asking questions about green, much like they do for diversity,” Eisenberg said.

Many attorneys spoke of the need to demonstrate leadership. “We think it’s important to show leadership within the business and legal communities so that others will follow our lead,” said Jonathan Storper, a partner with the law firm Hanson Bridgett in San Francisco.

The firm’s green initiatives, modeled after the city of San Francisco’s Green Business Certification, also had other ancillary benefits, Storper said.

“It’s actually raised morale in the firm,” Storper said. “Everyone in the firm said, ‘Wow, the firm is doing something good.’”

Their Footprint

Law firms are service businesses, and, as such, carry a carbon footprint similar to other office-oriented environments, such as accounting firms. But attorneys also are notorious consumers of paper and may generate a dozen hard-copy drafts to perfect a single legal brief. Most courts don’t allow double-sided legal filings.

The law firm Arnold and Porter conducted in informal survey of eight firms showing that in 2006, attorneys used between 20,000 and 100,000 sheets of paper each, according to the American Bar Association. That’s equal to roughly 10 to 50 sheets of paper per work hour, up to a half-ton of paper per year. One ton of paper can produce nine tons of carbon dioxide emissions, the organization said.

“The bugaboo for lawyers is, and for all intents and purposes, probably always will be paper because lawyers seem to think that every thought we have is sacred and must be memorialized with a piece of paper or it didn’t really happen,” Scott said.

Scott’s law office developed proprietary software that converts incoming faxes into a digital format that is automatically filtered into a corresponding computer case file, removing the need for someone to sort and deliver the printed faxes. The company enacted a mandatory double-sided printing policy, and the firm invested in paper with higher recycled content.

“We saved $2,000 net despite increasing files and buying more expensive paper,” Scott said.

Consumption of large amounts of paper presents an ideal opportunity to both step up recycling and change behaviors to reduce use overall. There are many other examples of low-hanging fruit, including water use: Scott explained how his firm phased out bottled water and installed water filters in offices, and ended up saving 20,000 bottles of water in a year.

Scott’s firm offers resources to arrange employee carpooling and sponsors “lunch-and-learn” events to foster environmental education. It also established “Conservation Corner,” a weekly newsletter that discusses trends in sustainability.

Energy consumption and business travel also contribute significantly to a firm’s footprint, and can be large hurdles to overcome. Scott’s law firm encourages its employees to power down electronics when not in use and has switched to compact fluorescent light bulbs. At the corporate level, Meritas, whose members are found in some 80 countries, now conducts orientations remotely rather than in person to curb travel.

Some initiatives require a not-insignificant capital investment. For instance, Umanoff’s firm Chadbourne and Parke decided to buy renewable energy certificates to offset 60 percent of the energy used in its U.S. offices. The company also spent money replacing toilets with low-flush models, buying reusable water bottles and switching to biodegradable silverware.

“It’s the right thing to do,” Umanoff said. “It was a modest cost investment to the firm so therefore it was not overwhelming.”

The Green Guide for Lawyers
Several resources exist to help lawyers green their operations. Storper’s firm, Hanson Bridgett, sought guidance from San Francisco’s Green Business Certification Program. Dozens of attorneys also have committed to the Massachusetts Bar Association Green Guidelines, which focus on eight areas of sustainability.

Umanoff’s firm recently became a certified Leader in the ABA-EPA Law Office Climate Challenge, one of the most prominent programs in the area. It launched in 2007 under the guidance of David Friedland, chair of the air quality committee of the ABA’s section on environment, energy and resources, and Howard Hoffman, vice chair of the air quality committee.

“Howard and David were believers that law firms and ABA should be taking a leadership position on this,” Eisenberg said. “What we needed to do was come up with a program that wasn’t going to ask so much from firms but something to get them involved on a basic level to get educated in sustainability.”

The program draws on previously established EPA initiatives, such as WasteWise, Green Power Partnership and Energy Star. A steady trickle of firms joined the program initially, picking up speed around the end of 2007, and just last month the program added around 15 firms, pushing the total past 60.

The Meritas Green Guide for Lawyers includes elements of the ABA-EPA Law Office Climate Change Challenge, as well as additional measures to help its members operate more sustainably. It is the result of a yearlong study by the Meritas Leadership Institute into how sustainability would present legal challenges to new and existing industries. Meritas is a nonprofit network of more than 170 independent law firms from around the world.

The guide it devised is divided into three tiers of initiatives: Sustainability Advocate, Partner and Leader. Each tier contains initiatives that fall into the Triple Bottom Line categories of people, profit and planet.

“The first tier is designed to raise awareness at law firms,” Arnold said. “The idea is the first step to incorporating sustainability is to at least be aware of the firm’s footprint.”

These first-tier actions include encouraging public transit for workers, recycling, switching to environmentally friendly cleaning products and conducting energy audits to identify ways to reduce energy consumptions.

“The second tier prompts law firms to start implementing sustainability and efficiency measures at the law firm itself,” Arnold said, such as investing in Energy Star equipment and pledging to cut resource consumption by 5 percent. Dedicating pro bono services to an environmental or sustainability organization is included.

The third tier involves more rigorous measures, such certifying its office space with the U.S. Green Building Council, sponsoring a nonprofit to become carbon-neutral through the purchase of carbon offsets and allocating additional pro bono hours.

“The guide is a start, and then we’re going to rely on the creativity of the Meritas member firms to implement the guide in lots of ways we could never imagine,” Arnold said.

Member firms will then share successes and challenges from implementing the initaitives, said Meritas President and CEO Tanna Moore.

“That’s one of our core initiatives, to share best practices,” Moore said. “There are a number of firms that have gone through the ABA-EPA approval process … and others that are just learning about it.”

The guide’s authors tried to specifically address the unique role of attorneys through the pro bono work aspects and counseling of clients in sustainability matters, Arnold said. Yet many of the initiatives could be used by businesses outside the legal realm.

“We also had to make it something that appealed to not only attorneys but people who actually run the offices,” Arnold said.

Scott used his law firm as a guinea pig for some of the initiatives listed in the Green Guide for Lawyers. “I wanted to see if these ideas were cockamamie or practical,” Scott said. “Overwhelmingly, we found them extremely practical.”

But he admits he did take some flak at first.

“One my partners said, ‘I thought it was the dumbest idea I ever heard,’” Scott said.

The tune of his partner and other skeptics at his law firm changed when they saw the initiatives’ benefits: The company saved money and generated more business, including three new clients within a year that can be directly attributed to their new sustainability credentials.

“Now,” Scott said, “they are starting to become true believers.”

Tilde Herrera is associate editor at GreenBiz.com.

from Triple Pundit by Angelique van Engelen

The European car industry is going to be heavily impacted by regulations on pollution limitations and tensions are rising between German manufacturers on one side and the French and Italian car industry on the other. Reason? German cars are much heavier than those made by the French and the Italians and the Germans fear that they will be penalized by new pollution regulations.

New cars by 2012 can only emit 120 grams of CO2 per kilometer at max. Most European cars average 160 grams per kilometer at the moment. The new rules are expected to transform the look and feel of all European cars. Even the smallest and most energy efficient cars are required to undergo design changes so the sector as a whole can reach the new goals.
EU policy makers have said that that the new regulations won’t alter established competition patterns. But Germans have a hard time believing this. The European Commission is considering sanctions for car makers who fail to reach the limits, in the range of €20 per extra gram of CO2 per car sold. This amount is set to rise to €95 by 2015. The top European environment policy maker, Stavros Dimas, has hinted last month in a German newspaper that manufacturers of bigger, heavier cars are going to be subject to less stringent rules than manufacturers of lighter cars if the car industry as a whole achieves the new EU emission levels. But whether that is realistic remains to be seen.

Unlike in the US, only 20% of all cars on the road in Europe are bigger in size. 60% of all cars in Europe are medium sized and 20% is small. There are worries throughout Europe that the new regulations are going to cause a shockwave and several politicians have called for a delay of three years.

But that is not on the cards. Instead the Europeans will at country level have to come up with the creativity to achieve the new targets. The EU politicians delivered the policy package recently because they say the sector itself did too little to combat CO2 emission levels.

Even though the changes are set to dramatically alter the European car landscape as a result of the draconian targets, Brussels wants to cut back more after 2012. Then the target will be limited to a 95 grams of carbon per kilometer. It’s not impossible to achieve on these goals, so long as the focus is on eco issues. Between 1995 and 2005, the European car industry has reduced its CO2 emission levels as much as 40g/km. But since 2005, around 15 grams of those reductions were lost due to more stringent security demands which resulted in heavier and bigger cars. Consumers in Europe are only slowly becoming enthusiastic about environmentally friendly cars.

Among the worst polluting cars are heavyweights such as BMWs, Mercedesses and Porches. A Porsche emits around 297 gram per kilometer. Top of the range cars owned by the rich and famous are however a tad worse. In a recent ranking of celebrity polluters, Simon Cowell scored first place by averaging CO2 emission levels of 457g/km due to possession of a Bugatti Veyron, a Farrari F430 and a Rolls-Royce Phantom. Justin Timberlake averaged 287g/km. He owns an Audi TT, a Jeep Wrangler and a Range Rover. He scored tenth on the list of celebrity polluters. The picture shows him with his Audi TT, which runs on eco fuel.
(Please click the headline if you would like to comment on this post)

From Treehugger.com

by Michael Graham Richard, Gatineau, Canada on 05.16.08

Cars & Transportation

Here is Carlos Ghosn, the celebrity CEO of Renault and Nissan:

“Nothing can stop the car being the most coveted product that comes with development, and more efficient conventional engines are not the answer. We must have zero-emission vehicles. Nothing else will prevent the world from exploding.”

Global Exploding? That has a nice ring to it. Hyperbole aside, congrats to Mr. Ghosn for his commitment to have Renault and Nissan “invest massively” into developing and commercializing parallel hybrid (like the Prius), series hybrid (like the Volt), and full-electric drivetrains. Ghosn says that his preference is with the latter, as is ours. ::Renault-Nissan’s ambitious plans for all-electric cars

from Triple Pundit by Argam DerHartunian

As a proponent of changing individual lifestyles to reduce environmental waste, I encourage sustainable living to more than just my close circle of friends and family. Lately, almost every social gathering I go to, be it a night in Hollywood or a family get together, my involvement in sustainability comes to be a topic of discussion. As part of this discussion, more often than not, people express their utter exhaustion with “green.”

Green is everywhere now, from billboards to TV shows. People are just bombarded with green this and green that, with each message telling them what to do or what not to do.

As Adam Werbach eloquently explained in his recent piece in AdvertisingAge.

“The marketing industry has leapt on green???Consumers are resisting the proliferation of ‘green’ communications and products being pushed at them from all directions. The recent Cone/Boston College survey showed that more than half of American consumers are “overwhelmed” by the tsunami of environment-related messaging. Less than half trust companies to tell them the truth about sustainable practices and products. Even fewer consumers believe companies are accurately communicating their environmental impact.”

People don’t like to be told what to do. Even more so, consumers are dissatisfied when a promised eco-friendly product or service is in actuality no better for the environment. Moreover, there is still a large sentiment that “going green” is a sacrifice and takes a lot of work and money to accomplish.

To quote Adam Werbach once more:

“We are witnessing green fatigue on a grand scale. ??? It is also threatening the credibility — and sustainability — of the marketing industry itself. People with no technical expertise in the complex harmonies that sustainability demands, no capacity to help a company reinvent its products or processes, and no sense of urgency are promising quick fixes and cheap tricks.”

Selfishness is the new selflessness. Every decision, be it a habit or the purchase of a product or service, needs to be evaluated first on an individual level while understanding its environmental impacts. In essence, each mind needs to be remapped to a new thought process.

Do and don’t lists must stop and a new decision process be developed. Sustainability is about an efficient and effective living. Simply put, environmentalism cannot exist without selfishness at its core. An environmentally friendly action should not be about a sacrifice, but about well thought out decision.

People are willing to learn and understand, thus, the rhetoric now needs to change to efficient living rather than sacrificial living. The exposure of thought processes behind making sustainable decisions must come to the forefront through innovative media endeavors and websites. Green fatigue will then cease to exist because the method of making these decisions will be an ever-improving evolutionary process immune from reaching a plateau.

Engaging in mental exercises that take into account one???s wallet, the environment, and personal benefits will help accelerate the evolution of the mind in this new era of sustainability. Of course, learning the benefits and drawbacks of habits, products, and services is necessary for these mental exercises to take place. Conservation is the first step, then progress will follow.

———————-
Argam DerHartunian is co-Founder and CIO of Creative Citizen, a website that informs individuals about daily actions that reduce environmental waste. He has blogged at VentureBeat about clean-tech companies. He can be contacted at argam@creativecitizen.com
———————-
Related articles: Life Goggles on a similar note.

from Gristmill

By Charles Komanoff

With gas at $3.50 a gallon in April, the U.S. mainstream media is replete with stories of drivers abandoning SUVs, hopping on mass transit, and otherwise cutting back on gasoline. Yet a year or two ago, when pump prices were approaching and even passing the $3.00 “barrier,” the media mantra was that demand for gasoline was so inelastic that high prices were barely making a dent in usage.

Which story is correct? I lean toward the more “elastic” view, and here I’d like to share some of the data that inform my belief.

I’ve been tracking official monthly data on U.S. gasoline consumption for the past five years and compiling the numbers in this spreadsheet. You’ll find that it parses the data in several different ways: year-on-year monthly comparisons (e.g., March 2008 vs. March 2007), three-month moving averages that smooth out most of the random variations in reporting, and full-year comparisons that allow a bird’s-eye view.

Here’s what I see in the data:

1. Gasoline demand is trending downward, though only slightly. In the 49 year-on-year comparisons in the spreadsheet, monthly gasoline use dipped below the year-earlier level only eight times, but these include each of the last five months (see Moving Avgs worksheet tab).
2. Gasoline’s short-run price-elasticity is rising. After a low of -0.04 in 2004, the short-run price-elasticity increased to -0.08 in 2005, -0.12 in 2006, and -0.16 in 2007. (I assume an “income-elasticity” of two-thirds in calculating price-elasticity; see Full Years worksheet.)
3. A big reason that gasoline use kept rising until recently was the growing economy. Demand is heavily affected by economic activity. The minimum year-on-year GDP growth for any month in all four years was plus 1.7 percent (see Moving Avgs worksheet).
4. Another reason gasoline demand was slow to drop is that the price signal, while significant, was less than advertised. Adjusted for general inflation, the average 2007 pump price was only 54 percent higher than the 2003 price. Amid all the talk of a doubling or even tripling in gas prices, it’s sobering to learn that you have to go all the way back to 1998 to find the last year that the real price was just half the 2007 price.
5. The biggest market barrier of all may have been gasoline price volatility. The spreadsheet spans 63 months, allowing 62 month-to-month comparisons. In 29 of these, the price went down (see 1-yr comparison worksheet). That’s right: the average gasoline price decreased from the prior month an astounding 47 percent of the time (see graph). Pump prices have been so volatile that consumers didn’t know whether the price three months later would be up or down. The result? American families and automakers alike found it hard to justify long-term investments in more-efficient cars. And allied policies like de-subsidizing sprawl didn’t get taken seriously.
6. Nevertheless, gas prices have now risen five years in a row and are virtually certain this year to chalk up a sixth. There hasn’t been a comparable period of sustained increases since the late 1970s.

The big takeaway for carbon taxes is that the short-run price-elasticity of gasoline demand is rising (point No. 2). (The long-run price-elasticity is probably around minus 0.4, as we discuss here.)

While a rising elasticity contradicts the standard economic model in which price-sensitivities don’t change much over time, point No. 5 provides a reasonable explanation: Gasoline prices (and energy prices in general) had fluctuated so wildly for decades, and a sense of entitlement to cheap gasoline had become so ingrained in American society, that it took a long time for households and businesses to internalize the rise in pump prices — to regard it as real.

Perhaps now, however, a line has been crossed. Maybe the trigger was the price of crude breaching $100 a barrel, or the unfolding credit crisis signaling a fundamental change in the U.S. economy. Or it may simply have been the accumulating weight of price increases noted in point No. 6. Whatever the reason(s), Americans finally seem to be getting the message that higher gas prices are here to stay.

That’s good news for the climate, national security, and green jobs … but it’s bitter medicine for hard-pressed families as well as business and jobs that aren’t oil-intensive but are being pulled under by gasoline-caused belt-tightening.

Now imagine if the price rises had been delivered not by a rapacious market but via socially mandated ramped-up increases in the gasoline tax (as some commentators have proposed since the 1970s, including, with renewed urgency, after 9/11 [PDF]).

Americans would have had time to adapt, along with real choices such as truly fuel-efficient cars and smaller houses in more-compact developments. And the extra revenues from the higher-priced gasoline would have belonged to all of us rather than just the owners of oil reserves. Those revenues could have been returned to households and businesses via tax-shifts or dividends, not skimmed off for private enrichment.

The analogy to a revenue-neutral carbon tax couldn’t be more clear.

from Planetizen 

Posted by: Nate Berg

6 May 2008 - 6:00am

A year after a tornado destroyed the city of Greensburg, Kansas, the city and its residents are bounding back in an economically and environmentally sustainable way.

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