Chip Ward is a former grassroots organizer who has led several successful campaigns to make polluters accountable. The author of Canaries on the Rim and Hope’s Horizon, he writes from Torrey, Utah. This essay is adapted from one that was originally published in The Nation in 2009.

Excerpt:

…Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark, reports that, within the deindustrialized
ruins of Detroit, a landscape she describes as “not quite postapocalyptic
but…post-American,” people are homesteading abandoned lots, growing
their own produce, raising farm animals, and planting orchards. In that
depopulated city, some have been clawing (or perhaps hoeing) their way back
to a semblance of food security. They have done so because they had to, and
their reward has been harvests that would be the envy of any organic farmer.
The catastrophe that is Detroit didn’t happen with a Hurricane Katrina–style
bang, but as a slow, grinding bust—and a possibly haunting preview of what
many American municipalities may experience postcrash. Solnit claims, however,
that the greening of Detroit under the pressure of economic adversity is
not just a strategy for survival, but a possible path to renewal. It’s also a living
guidebook to possibilities for our new Department of Homegrown Security
when it considers where it might most advantageously put some of its financial
muscle while creating a more secure—and resilient—America.

As chef and author Alice Waters has demonstrated so practically, schools
can start “edible schoolyard” gardens that cut lunch-program costs, provide
healthy foods for students, and teach the principles of ecology. The foodgrowing
skills and knowledge that many of our great-grandparents took for
granted growing up in a more rural America have long since been lost in our
migration into cities and suburbs. Relearning those lost arts could be a key
to survival if the trucks stop arriving at the Big Box down the street.

The present Department of Homeland Security has produced reams of
literature on detecting and handling chemical weapons and managing casualties
after terrorist attacks. Fine, we needed to know that. Now, how about
some instructive materials on composting soil, rotating crops to control
pests and restore soil nutrients, and canning and drying all that seasonal
bounty so it can be eaten next winter?

It’s not just about increasing the local food supply, of course. Community
gardens provide a safe place for neighbors to cooperate, socialize, bond,
share, celebrate, and learn from one another. The self-reliant networks that
are created when citizens engage in such projects can be activated in an
emergency. The capacity of a community to self-organize can be critically
important when a crisis is confronted. Such collective efforts have been
called community greening or civic ecology, but the traditional name grassroots
democracy fits no less well.

Here’s the interesting thing: without federal aid or direction, the first
glimmer of a green approach to homeland security is already appearing. It
goes by the moniker relocalization, and if that’s a bit of an awkward mouthful
for you, it really means that your most basic security is in the hands
not of distant officials in Washington but of neighbors who believe that
self-reliance is safer than dependence. In this emerging age of chaos, pooled
resources and coordinated responses will, this new movement believes, be
more effective than thousands of individuals breaking out their survival kits
alone or waiting for the helicopters to land.

Actually, relocalization is an international movement and, as usual
when it comes to the greening of modern society, the Europeans are way
ahead of us. There are now hundreds of local groups in at least a dozen
countries that are convening local meetings as part of the Relocalization
Network to “make other arrangements for the post-carbon future” of their
communities. In Great Britain, an allied Transition Towns movement has
sprung up in an effort to spark ideas about, and focus energies on, how to
wean whole communities off imported energy, food, and material goods.
With a rising sea at its front door, the Netherlands has taken a further step.
Its national security plan actually makes sustainability and environmental
recovery key priorities.

In the United States, post-carbon working groups are beginning to sprout
across the country. In my backyard, right in the heart of red-state Utah, a
diverse group of citizens calling themselves the Canyonlands Sustainable
Solutions have come together to generate practical plans for insulating the
remote town of Moab, 200 miles from the trade and transport hub of Salt
Lake City, from future food and energy price shocks and supply interruptions.
Such local groups are often loosely allied with one another, especially
regionally, through websites and blogs that report on the progress of diverse
projects, trade ideas as well as information, and offer lots of feedback.

The citizens engaged in relocalization projects have largely given up on
federal aid and are going it alone. Still, think how much farther they could
go if only a fraction of the $27 billion directed at state and local governments
to enhance “emergency preparedness” in the 2009 Department of Homeland
Security budget were given in grants to their projects. If we can afford to
hand rural Craighead County in Arkansas $600,000 for hazmat suits and
other antiterror paraphernalia to defend cotton and soybean farmers from
attack, surely we could provide grants for urban homesteaders in Detroit.

Food security, of course, is just one aspect of a green vision of homegrown
security. Other obvious elements like energy and water security
could also be reimagined, if only official Washington weren’t so stuck in
the obvious. No doubt, somewhere out there on the Titanic this planet is
becoming, the go-it-aloners, with no Department of Homegrown Security
to back them, are already doing so—and helping prepare us all as best they
can for the realization that, right now, there are not enough lifeboats to carry
us to safety.

Perhaps it’s not so unrealistic to expect that someday, as a homegrown
security movement builds and matures, it can capture a share of the federal
funds that now go to such dubious measures as closed-circuit televisions
and crash-proof barriers at sports stadiums, including $345,000 for Razorback
Stadium in Arkansas.

In the meanwhile, let’s encourage projects that are building resilience in
communities as small as Moab and as large as New York City, while revitalizing
local culture with a dose of grassroots engagement. Seed it and feed it,
and it will bloom. Along the way we will learn that when it comes to home,
or land, or security, living in an open, inclusive, and robust democracy is
not an impediment to defense but a deep advantage. Democracy, if only we
nurture it, is the very soil of our resilience.

Michelle Nijhuis is a contributing editor of High Country News. Her work has also appeared in Smithsonian, National Geographic, The New York Times, and the anthologies Best American Science Writing and Best American Science and Nature Writing. She and her family live off the grid in Paonia, Colorado.

Excerpt:

By 2006, close to 150,000 acres of Colorado aspen were dead or damaged,
according to aerial surveys. By the following year, the grim phenomenon
had a name—sudden aspen decline, or SAD—and by 2008, the damaged
areas had exceeded half a million acres, with 17 percent of the state’s
aspen showing declines. In many places, patches of bare and dying treetops
are as noticeable as missing teeth, and some sickly areas stretch for miles.
Aspen declines are also underway in Wyoming, Utah, and elsewhere in the
Rockies. Surveys of two national forests in Arizona showed that from 2000
to 2007, lower-elevation areas lost 90 percent of their aspen.

Aspen grow in clones, or groups of genetically identical trunks. Some
clones are thousands of years old, although individual trees live 150 years
at most. One especially large stand in Utah, known as Pando, after the Latin
for “I spread,” was recently confirmed by geneticists to cover 108 acres. It is
variously said to be the world’s heaviest, largest, or oldest organism. Disturbances such as wildfires or disease usually prompt clones to send up a slew of fresh sprouts, but new growth is rare in SAD-affected stands.

….The most extensive SAD is in the hottest and driest areas—low-lying,
south-facing slopes. The pattern suggests that the region’s extreme drought
and high temperatures—both possible symptoms of global warming—have
weakened the trees, allowing more disease and insect attacks.
It seems that new stems aren’t growing back after trees die because
drought and heat have stressed the trees. During drought, aspen close off
microscopic openings in their leaves, a survival measure that slows water
loss but also slows the uptake of carbon dioxide, required for photosynthesis.
As a result, the trees can’t convert as much sunlight into sugar. Worrall
speculates that the trees absorb stored energy from their own roots, eventually
killing the roots and preventing the rise of new aspen sprouts. “They
basically starve to death,” he says.

The drought here has lasted nearly a decade, and climate scientists predict
that severe droughts will strike even more often in parts of the West as
greenhouse gas levels continue to rise and contribute to global warming. “If
we have more hot, dry periods as predicted, SAD will continue,” says Worrall.
Aspen at lower elevations will likely disappear, he says, and those at
higher elevations will be weaker and sparser.

Susan Innis is the Colorado Carbon Fund program manager for the Colorado Governor’s Energy Office (GEO). Prior to joining GEO in 2007, Innis spent eight years as an energy policy advisor and green-power marketing director at Western Resource Advocates, a regional conservation law and policy center. She holds a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Colorado at Denver, studied energy planning and sustainable development at the University of Oslo, and earned a bachelor’s of science degree in biology from McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Excerpt:

Coloradans have long had a strong interest in supporting clean-energy projects
in their own communities. For the past decade, most of the state’s electric
utilities have offered voluntary green-pricing programs, whereby folks
can opt to pay a bit more on their power bill to support new wind farms.
Those programs were instrumental in helping to jumpstart the first few
renewable-energy projects in the state. They were successful in part because
folks could drive an hour outside the Denver metro area and see some of the
country’s first large wind farms. Citizens felt a strong and direct connection
in helping to make those new projects happen.

In 2004, Colorado voters increased support for renewable energy by
passing the first statewide referendum on renewable energy. Amendment
37 required utilities to obtain 10 percent of their energy mix from renewable
sources like solar and wind. Due to popular support, the state legislature
later expanded that policy, and now the state’s largest utilities will get
20 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2020. The voluntary
green-pricing programs and progressive state renewable-energy policies
have led to the installation of more than 1,000 megawatts of wind energy
and thousands of rooftop solar panels.

Over the past few years, some consumers have started to question whether
paying more on your utility bill can really help drive renewable-energy
installations beyond what would be happening anyway in response to state
policy mandates. There is a strong interest among some businesses—Aspen
Skiing Company, for example—to drive development and innovation even
further. Aspen Skiing Company and others have expressed a strong interest
in directly helping to fund brand-new, local projects. They want to see
that their investment in renewable energy directly leads to new projects
being developed and they prefer to see those projects developed as locally
as possible. Through the Colorado Carbon Fund, we now have a product
that responds to this market demand to link a voluntary purchase with a
brand-new, local greenhouse gas– mitigation project. While carbon offsets
are rather intangible, to the extent we can help make the direct link between
a company’s donation and a new project, the more we can build credibility.
There are a number of carbon-offset programs that are run by nonprofits
and for-profit companies. Many of them are focused on developing projects
overseas, which is terrific for helping the developing world move ahead with
innovative technologies. However, here in Colorado, many folks want to
have a more direct role in solving the climate-change problem. Since our
reliance on fossil fuels has helped create the problem, it makes sense to try
to change the way we do things locally.

The Governor’s Energy Office hopes that the Colorado Carbon Fund will
build capacity within the state to develop greenhouse gas–mitigation projects
and monetize the reductions to participate in national and international carbon
markets. With President Barack Obama’s administration’s commitment to
make the United States an international leader in tackling climate change, the
Colorado Carbon Fund can serve as a model for developing expertise among
local businesses and agencies in participating in the international market.

Jason Salzman is an award-winning writer and media consultant. His articles or commentaries have been published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The Christian Science Monitor, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, the Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Nonprofit World, Sierra, Utne Reader, and elsewhere. He’s a former media critic for the Rocky Mountain News, and he’s the coauthor of Making the News: A Guide for Activists and Nonprofits and 50 Ways You Can Help Obama Change America. Salzman is cofounder of Effect Communications.

Excerpt:

You’d expect a newspaper like The Denver Post to give major play to the story
about mountain pine beetles devouring Colorado’s lodgepole pines, and it is.
It’s no Jon Benét Ramsey–style media frenzy, but the pine-beetle infestation
was the focus of fourteen staff-written news articles from January 2008
through May 2009 in The Post, covering everything from its potential impact
on tourism to legislative efforts to fund beetle-related battles.
But The Post’s coverage of the possible connection between the dying
forests and global warming has been skimpy at most….

The Post’s news coverage about the pine beetles raises the question of
whether journalists should discuss the possible role of global warming when
reporting on an event that may—or may not—be caused by it. And if they
do mention global warming in this context, are journalists obligated to quote
skeptics who may not think global warming is occurring at all?
Addressing the first question, Christy George, special projects producer
at Oregon Public Broadcasting, told me that when it comes to covering
events like forest fires or hurricanes, reporters should explain the possible
role of climate change in their stories. (George is the current president of
the Society of Environmental Journalists, but spoke to me as an individual
reporter, not on behalf of that organization.)

“It’s not that we want bad science, where people say [a hurricane] is
caused by climate change,” she says. “But the good science that says you can’t
say this is climate change, but this is what we’d expect with climate change.”
The pine-beetle story also deserves this type of journalistic treatment,
with different views on the possible role of climate change in the infestation.
And should global-warming skeptics be quoted?
George observes that the most hard-core global-warming skeptics have
made a shift, previously asserting that there was no such thing as climate change
at all but now saying the climate is changing, but humans are not responsible.
She thinks the views of these skeptics need not be included in stories.
“There’s no value to me as a reporter to continue to throw in that person
who says humans aren’t causing climate change at all, because we’re just
past that, in terms of the scientific evidence,” she says. “There are tremendous
disagreements about the impacts [of climate change] and what to do.
We don’t have to look hard to find conflict in the story,” she said.

Martha Records is a Cleantech investor and the founder of Green Spark Ventures. She lives in Denver, Colorado, and enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountain region with her husband and three children.

Excerpt:

The Cleantech space is fairly unwieldy. Spanning the entire spectrum
of possible end users and including technologies in areas as far-ranging as
renewable-energy generation, energy-efficiency infrastructure, water, energy
storage, transportation, building materials, plastics, chemicals, recycling,
and waste, the Cleantech sector is hard to contain. Since opening our doors,
we have met with such a variety of companies. Two Colorado start-ups have
developed new energy-efficient window technologies. Another focuses on
the conversion of organic wastes such as cow manure into pipeline gas. An
Idaho Springs company, Oberon, is working on converting liquid waste
from breweries and food processors into protein meal that could be used as a
replacement for fish meal in aquaculture. In Boulder, EEtrex converts hybrid
vehicles into plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles and is developing a vehicle-togrid
bidirectional charger. Porous Power, a company based in Lafayette, has
developed a laminable battery separator that can reduce production costs,
enable faster charge times, improve battery performance, and increase the
cell cycle life of lithium-ion batteries. And there are so many more.

Green Spark has met with thirty-five Colorado companies and a handful
of companies on the West Coast. We have heard from dozens more at
industry conferences and Cleantech gatherings. This is just our experience
in Colorado, a small slice of the larger Cleantech market. I doubt there is
any precedent to this full-throttled enthusiasm on the part of entrepreneurs
for creating such a wide range of companies with the dual purposes of both
making a profit and contributing to the social good. At times it feels almost
like a war effort, but instead of it being led from above by charismatic figures,
this effort is instead advanced by the individual efforts of idealists and
businesspeople who are frequently one and the same.

The extent of the entrepreneurial activity in this space is particularly
impressive given the difficulties these emerging companies face. They must
try to secure capital. They must find and hire scientists willing to work for
below-market pay until operating funds are secured. They must assemble a
competent management team, protect intellectual property, create groundbreaking innovation, and, in many cases, do so without the certainty that any real market will ever exist for their product. Although Cleantech entrepreneurs operate in widely disparate business fields, what most of them share is a desire to make a difference. And that is where we find common ground.

Heidi VanGenderen is a third-generation Colorado native who served as the state’s first gubernatorial climate advisor. She has worked on energy and climate issues in the nongovernmental organization, public, academic, and private sectors and recently completed the Chevening Fellowship in Edinburgh and London.

Excerpt:

“Climate change is like the Internet. It’s getting bigger every year, it’s not
going away, and you need to figure out how to make money from it.”
This entrepreneurial observation comes from Paul Dickinson, cofounder
and executive director of the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) in London.
The CDP is a nonprofit organization that has amassed the “largest database
of corporate climate-change information in the world.” The CDP issues questionnaires
to companies of all stripes, and the responses can be accessed
by essentially anyone, including institutional investors, governments, and
individuals. In a world in danger of being filled with too much information,
CDP’s database is information that can matter, because it can and does help
guide investment decisions. And that is one key strategy in our ability to
meet both the challenges and the opportunities of climate change.
We who are fortunate enough to reside in the western United States
know challenge well. We live on unforgiving lands, and, by god, we can
face adversity and come through whatever comes at us because we are self-reliant.
We are rugged individuals who also can demonstrate an entrepreneurial
flair. When it comes to climate change, can and will we apply both

of these traits? Will we do so, in part, by reaching beyond the borders of our own well-loved region to learn what is working elsewhere so that we may borrow and adapt good ideas?

Awareness and acceptance of the human ability to alter the Earth’s
atmosphere clearly differs around the planet. I know this better now through
the opportunity to gather in an international fellowship thanks to the British
Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Fourteen of us representing eleven dif-
ferent countries listened, learned, and debated solutions to climate change
through the lens of finance and investment.

The perspectives from colleagues, and now friends, from China, India,
Malaysia, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Turkey, South Africa, Canada, Australia, and
Indonesia vastly expanded my personal horizons. Because we were based
at the University of Edinburgh, with several forays to London, one of the
world’s premier finance capitals, we were treated, in particular and under-
standably, to a UK perspective.

For starters, the public presence of climate change is greater in the
United Kingdom than in the US and most certainly far greater than, say,
in Kazakhstan. Whether on the British Broadcasting Corporation television
news in the debate over whether another runway should be added at Heath-
row, in product labels, in public displays in museums, or in ads everywhere,
the direct topic of climate change and the imperative to reduce carbon emis-
sions is a much greater part of the UK’s lexicon than that of the US. We in
America are more likely, perhaps, to use the phrase global warming than in
the UK, as they seem to use climate change nearly exclusively—but we are far
less direct in our address of the topic overall than those in the UK.
Consumer labeling is an evident strategy in the UK. The supermarket
chain Tesco, for example, has taken the initiative to list the amount of car-
bon dioxide emitted in the production and distribution of some of the prod-
ucts it sells so that concerned consumers can use this information in their
purchasing decisions.

Mark Eddy is a former environment writer for The Denver Post and current principal at Mark Eddy Communications, a Denver-based consulting firm specializing in strategic communications. In his spare time, he travels, hikes, and bikes with his wife, Diane, and dog, Charley—and tends his bees. He can be reached at wmmarkeddy@gmail.com.

Excerpt:

The story jolted us. It was a wake-up call we couldn’t ignore. It was late
2005, and my wife and I had just read that some scientists were predicting
the glaciers on Kilimanjaro could be gone in as little as fifteen or twenty
years. Doing some online research, we found many similar stories, including
several that said the glaciers had lost 82 percent of their mass since 1912 and
the mountain could be ice free by 2020.

We’d always talked about hiking to the top of Kili—it was on that jumbled
list of travel adventures we keep in our heads—but somehow other
trips kept pushing it back to next year, and then the next, and the next.
It wasn’t as if my wife and I were living in a cave. We knew climate change
was happening and that it would have devastating impacts. But we, like a lot
of people, thought it was happening relatively slowly. We tend to think of
major Earth changes in terms of lifetimes and not years. And at the time, the
estimates of how fast the changes were happening were much more conservative
than they are today. These changes, we thought at the time, wouldn’t have
dramatic impacts for quite a while. We had time to see the glaciers.

But this news was transformational for us. If the glaciers Hemingway
made famous were really going to be gone in less than two decades, that
meant they were getting smaller all the time. We needed to make climbing
Kili a priority instead of something we just talked about.

We researched outfitters that fall and winter, and in early 2006 booked
a climb for that September. Through the spring and summer, we hiked Colorado’s
fourteeners to get our legs and lungs in shape. On September 1, we
took off for Tanzania.

…On Kili, you walk slowly, very slowly. In fact, until you do it, you
wouldn’t think you could walk that slowly for five and a half days (the day
and a half downhill is taken at a sometimes-breakneck pace). So on the way
up, there’s a lot of time to think and talk. I wondered about not only the
glaciers, but everything that depended on them. What would happen to the
rain forest we’d walked through and the white colobus monkeys, giant ferns,
and massive trees that lived there? How would they survive without the
water from snow- and glacier melt? How would the farmers who depended
on the corn they grew on the flanks of the big mountain to feed their families
fare if the crops withered when the glaciers were gone? Would the entire
area turn into a moonscape covered with volcanic dust and populated with
drought-resistant plants like the upper slopes of the mountain?

Matthew H. Brown has worked for twenty years in Europe, North America, and Asia on energy issues. Brown has written more than fifty articles and books on renewable energy, energy efficiency, energy regulation, transmission, energy technology, and critical infrastructure protection. He holds a bachelor of arts degree from Brown University and a master of business administration from New York University.

Excerpt:

The typical activist government or business response to evidence of climate
change is to commit to reduce carbon emissions. Many go further and make
specific commitments to buy power from renewable-energy sources or to
reduce their energy consumption. A few take other steps like buying carbon
offsets to effectively neutralize their emissions of greenhouse gasses.
These are critical steps. But an essential element is missing—one that is a
necessary step if the fight to stabilize carbon emissions is to be successful:
financing. This chapter describes a few innovations in financing the transformation
to a low-carbon economy. These innovations do not rely solely
on government funding; such funding will always be limited and will never
be sufficient to stimulate the massive changes that will be required for this
transformation. Instead, these innovations focus on exploring ways to leverage
private and public capital, using both funding sources together so as to
multiply their combined effects.

The historical background upon which these innovations rests began
in the late 1970s in the United States when states like California and the
federal government adopted policies to encourage renewable energy. Climate
change was not yet on the policy agenda at the time; energy security
was paramount. Some of these early policies worked successfully over several
years to nudge emerging renewable markets closer to the mainstream.
California’s combination of tax credits and standardized utility payments
to independent renewable-power generators in the 1980s are an example
of this kind of financing policy. The financial returns from these California
policies alongside federal tax incentives meant that developers of renewableenergy
facilities could often make money from the incentives alone, whether
or not their facilities actually produced any energy. Fundamentally, though,
such a policy is not sustainable; it relies on a business model that is entirely
dependent on subsidies, and subsidies themselves rely on government’s
unpredictable appetite to consistently extend those subsidies.

Ideally, the financing arrangements to support energy efficiency and
renewable energy should rely less on subsidies and more on sustainable
financial partnerships between governments and the private sector to provide
low-cost capital for clean energy. To be really successful and sustainable,
however, any public-private financing initiatives should follow four
rules. The initiatives must be:
• Scalable. They must be able to step up to a very large scale; pilot programs
are fine, but the goal should be to mobilize large amounts of capital and
deploy that capital through well-marketed programs that reach large numbers
of people.
• Secure. Initiatives must recognize that money put at greater risk will cost
more than money put at lower risk. Therefore, financing programs should
be structured to provide secure ways to recoup money and to distribute
risks to those who can best bear those risks.
• Sustainable. Initiatives that rely on rebates may have a short-term impact
on building a market for technologies that are more expensive than their
traditional competitors. However, a goal for financing should be to seek
sustainable sources of funding that can provide steady support to the
investments that the private sector and governments must make over a
period of many years.
• Simple. Simplicity is key. People must be able to borrow money through
a streamlined process that performs quickly and minimizes paperwork
while adhering to underwriting standards necessary to ensure that borrowers
will be able to repay their loans. Financing programs, whether
designed for homeowners, developers, industry, or government agencies
should be designed for simplicity.

James R. (Randy) Udall developed Colorado’s first solar-energy incentive program, the world’s first renewable-energy mitigation program, and some of the most progressive green-power purchasing programs in the country. Udall is cofounder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas–USA and writes from Carbondale, Colorado.

Excerpt:

In Colorado, as in China, the petroleum-fueled automobile and coal-fired
power plant are at the center of the climate challenge. To slow and then halt
global warming will require dramatic changes in how we produce and use
electricity, and equally dramatic changes in how we transport people and
move goods.

In 2007, Colorado governor Bill Ritter asked the state’s electric utilities
to develop a plan to reduce their carbon-dioxide emissions 20 percent
by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050 from their 2005 levels. In response, Holy
Cross Energy, a rural electric utility, studied how it—and the Colorado electric
sector as a whole—could meet those ambitious goals.* Here is a snapshot
of our findings:

• The growth dynamic—the difficulty of running down an up escalator—
complicates efforts to reduce emissions. Cutting greenhouse gases in the
face of increasing demand for electricity will be difficult and potentially
expensive.

• In 2005, coal plants produced 72 percent of Colorado’s power, natural-gas
plants 24 percent, and hydropower, wind, and solar the rest. To meet Governor
Ritter’s 2020 goal, coal use would have to fall by nearly half, while
natural-gas generation would have to nearly double. Carbon-free resources
and efficiency savings would need to provide one-third of the state’s electricity
by 2020, up from 4 percent in 2005.

• Up to 2,700 megawatts of the state’s existing coal generation, out of about 4,900 megawatts operating today, would need to be retired and replaced with combined-cycle natural-gas plants, wind farms, and other lower emitting
generation technologies.

• The statewide price tag for meeting the reduction targets would rise over
time as natural gas replaced coal and new, lower-emitting plants were
built. If electricity consumption grows by 2 percent annually, then by
2020 Coloradans could be spending $1 billion more each year for electric
power, above and beyond normal price escalation.

• If Colorado wants to reduce its carbon footprint, bipartisan leadership will
be crucial. Citizens must be engaged in the discussion, since effective climate
policies can only be crafted with their support, and because they will
have to pay the costs of climate protection.

Catherine Greener is chief executive officer and founder of Greener Solutions, Inc. Her previous positions included vice president of Sustainability Consulting at Saatchi & Saatchi S, team leader of the Commercial and Industrial team of the Rocky Mountain Institute, and director of quality and customer focus for a division of ABB. Greener lives in Boulder, Colorado, in a house featured on the Boulder solar-home tour.

Excerpt:

There has been a tremendous amount of work done by the business community
to contribute to the field of sustainable business. There are numerous
examples of companies using less energy, less raw material, and less
water. Some would argue that if we had another 500 years or so to continue
this trajectory of incremental and continuous improvement, doing less bad,
we would be able to reinvent commerce without much disruption. We don’t
have that luxury. Our climate and our world are changing rapidly around us.
The spirit of sustainable pioneering is what is needed now. Individuals and
companies who are pursuing the bold experiments are proving that success
of the company and success of the environment are not inverse relationships.
The first principle of natural capitalism emphasizes the need for radical
resource efficiency to buy time. But the companies highlighted here are
going beyond the first principle and are finding ways to reinvent their products,
processes, company governances, and infrastructures. These organizations
are exploring virtually the unknown and claiming these new territories
as viable ventures.

Despite their differences, all four of the companies have similarities.
They have been guided by strong visions, goals, and commitments to creating
a sustainable future. They have opened up new areas of thought and possibilities,
making appropriate adaptations based upon the lessons learned
through their sustainable experiments, and have openly shared their adventures
with others. They have a strong sense of “what if?” and inspire others
in their industry to follow the paths they have created.

Sustainable pioneers such as Pangea Organics, New Belgium Brewing
Company, Namasté Solar Electric, and ProLogis are providing the leadership
and paths for other companies to quickly follow and find their own
pioneering spirit to reinvent everything and restore our climate and planet
for generations to come.