Future Energy

McKinsey Talks to Executives About Sustainability

Today I put together a post on the blog at my company website, Eos Consulting, that you may find of interest.

Yesterday, the McKinsey Quarterly, the in-house journal of McKinsey Management Consultants, came out with its latest survey of global executives - this time looking at how companies are defining, managing and communicating about sustainability.    In How Companies Manage Sustainability: McKinsey Global Survey Results, the authors describe the results from their survey of more than 1,900 executives in corporations around the world.

Catch the rest of the story here.

Restoring the Great Plains

  Source: dailykos.com

I started out a day or two ago trying to track down some information on a new book by a Saskatchewan author I have enjoyed in the past, Trevor Herriot.  What I found instead was his blog, Grass Notes, and in particular a February blog post regarding the "American Prairie Reserve".  Herriot introduces the concept and highlights a book about the concept by Richard Manning, entitled Rebuilding the West -Restoration in a Prairie Landscape.  In Herriot's own words:

"Richard Manning’s big idea is to work with private and public conservation agencies and the people of the northern Great Plains to find a way to draw a border of ecological protection around 3.5 million acres of native prairie centering on the Missouri River passes through the Missouri Breaks National Monument and the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. They call it “The American Prairie Preserve” and estimate that for $250 million (about ten days of the Iraq war expenditure), enough of the necessary private land could be purchased to create “a Yellowstone of the Plains.”"

Richard Manning's "big idea" is in turn, based on a 2004 ecological assessment prepared by the Northern Plains Conservation Network, which identifies key prairie grassland landscapes where opportunities exist to restore large-scale ecological processes and provide habitat for significant populations of native wildlife.  Supported by a consortium of 16 ENGO's (including the Denver Zoo, if you can call them an ENGO), Oceans of Grass: A Conservation Assessment of the Northern Great Plains provides a detailed blueprint for conserving and restoring these landscapes.   

Source: Trevor Herriot's Grass Notes

What I find most interesting about the American Prairie Reserve are the parallels with the Buffalo Commons, a concept put forward by Frank and Deborah Popper in 1987.  I first read about Buffalo Commons in the Wall Street Journal, I think about ten years ago, but the idea was first advanced in 1987 in an article published in Planning.  The Poppers were proposing that the drier portions of the Great Plains, an area totalling 360,000 square kilometres in ten western states, be restored to native grasslands and stocked with buffalo.  The idea was driven by the exodus of people from the Great Plains, which continues unabated even today, and the expectation that the Ogalalla Aquifer was approaching exhaustion.

The American Prairie Reserve and the Buffalo Commons reflect a desire to return a vast and increasingly empty section of North America back to their pre-European settlement condition.  There are those that would step even further back, towards a re-wilding that restored Pleistocene megafauna, or their nearest relatives, to some big landscapes.  I suppose it all depends on what you consider the baseline to be.

It might be easy to take a tongue-in-cheek attitude to these proposals, except that they represent what is likely to become one of the biggest focuses in future environmental management - restoration and human management of wild landscapes.  Certainly thats the premise put forward by Stephen Meyer in The End of the Wild.  His argument is a bit more complex than I can hope to capture in a couple of lines, but it rests on a the belief that "we have lost the wild for now.  Perhaps in five or ten million years it will return."   Meyer's prescription includes:

• Coming to terms with what we have wrought;
• Research to apply "the cold light of a necropsy to dissect the collapsing processes of natural selection";
• Protecting the landscape and the integrity and complexity of ecosystem processes; and
• Intensive management of plant and animal populations.

Its a bleak outlook but probably realistic.  With a human population of six billion growing to, arguably, 10 billion, there will be little no opportunity for the global environment to go back to where it started.  Restoration and hands-on management will almost certainly be required.

The Red and the Dead

Last week, Yale's environment 360 has provided two stories focusing on forest management in an era of global warming.  Forest management is not a usual focus for me except that it is increasingly being affected by the global weirding of the weather and that is an energy issue, so on we go.

In the first story, Whats Killing the Great Forests of the American West?, Montana writer Jim Robbins looks at one of the most visible impacts of global warming here in western North America.  Exploding populations of mountain pine beetle and other bark beetles that are carving a swath through western forests from Alaska to Mexico.  Mr. Robbin's report connects the mountain pine beetle infestation to a phenomenon of insect infestations that extends the entire length of the Rocky Mountains, impacting more than 70,000 square miles of forests - and that's just since 2000.

Living in B.C., mountain pine beetle's assault on the province's forest lands has been unfolding for more than a decade now (and covers much more of the province than just the Rockies, beetle killed forests can be found less than two hours drive east of Vancouver).  The most recent Ministry of Forests estimates suggest 14.5 million hectares of forest land have been impacted, changing the economy of many of the province's small towns and the ecology of large parts of the province.

And beginning in June 2006 a significant infestation spread into Alberta as strong winds lifted beetles over the spine of the Rockies and into the west-central part of the province - a distance of more than 400 kilometres.

That's just two provinces. 

Beetle kills are the result of a warming climate and they are likely to have a positive feedback effect on the climate, flipping forests from carbon sinks into carbon sources.  Wikipedia reports on Canadian Forest Service modeling of the forest carbon cycle that suggests that by 2020 the pine beetle outbreak will have released 270 mega-tonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere from Canadian forests.  But with Mr. Robbins suggesting that B.C.'s forests crossed that tipping point in 2008 are we ahead of schedule?

From where I sit, Mr. Robbins seems to have done a good job of stating the obvious when he points out that:

"While people in some places have the luxury to doubt whether climate change is real, it's harder to be a doubter in the Rocky Mountains.  Glaciers in Glacier National Park and elsewhere are shrinking, winters are warmer and shorter, and the intensity of forest fires is increasing.  But the most obvious sign is the red and dead forests that carpet the hills and mountains.  They have transformed life in parts of the Rockies."

  Still on the topic of forests and climate change, environment 360's second story points to fire as a potentially important tool for mitigating climate warming impacts to the region's forests.  In Prescribed Burns in U.S. West Would Cut Carbon Footprint, 360 cites a study published in Environmental Science and Technology by Christine Weidinmyer and Matthew Hurteau (link to full paper).  Ms. Weidinmyer and Mr. Hurteau point to significant carbon management benefits using controlled burns and to the protection from wildfires that would also result.

"Using satellite imagery and models that calculate carbon emissions related to wildfires from 2001 to 2008, researchers predicted that prescribed burns could reduce such emissions by 18 to 25 percent - and as much as 60 percent in some areas."

Clearly forest management needs to change - along with the changes that are happening in the way forests are used.  I'm sure there's more to come.

Mountain Pine Beetle  

All photos courtesy of: BC Ministry of Forests 

Green Oil?

Source: Fast Company

Newsweek recently ranked 500 U.S. companies on their environmental credentials (see The Greenest Big Companies in America, September 28th).  Only one oil and gas company, Marathon Oil, is included in the top 100 companies and it was number 100. 

After Marathon, you would have to travel down the list to the 154^th spot to find the next oil and gas company, Baker Hughes, an oil and gas service company.  Notably, the coal fired utilities grabbed 13 of the bottom 20 spots in the ranking - NRG Energy ranked 499^th.  Clean coal anyone?

Newsweek relied on three partners to construct the ranking, including:

• Trucost - calculated environmental impact scores;
• KLD Research & Analytics - calculated green policy scores;
• Corporate Register.com - conducted a reputational survey.

The overall scores combined all three of these components and from the limited information on the methodology each partner followed, the scoring looks to be fair.

Back in February 2008, Fast Company magazine went through a similar exercise and ranked the sustainability of the world's 10 largest oil and gas companies (see Fast Company Looks At Oil, February 4, 2008).  In a subsequent post I put together a table comparing Fast Company's rankings with those from the Dow Jones Sustainability Index and the Global 100 Most Sustainable Companies.  I've updated here to include the Newsweek rankings.  Not a lot of overlap.

Companies	Newsweek	Global 100	DJSI	Fast Company
BG Group		√	√
BP			√	1
Royal Dutch Shell		√	√	2
Chevron	√ (371)			3
Marathon Oil	√ (100)			4
ConocoPhillips	√ (238)			5
Total			√	6
ExxonMobil	√ (395)			7
Encana			√
Eni S.p.A.				9
Neste Oil OYJ		√	√
Nexen		√	√
Petroleo Brasileiro			√
Repsol			√	8
Saipem		√
Sasol			√
StatoilHydro		√	√
Suncor			√
TransCanada		√
Valero Energy	√ (332)			10
Woodside Petroleum			√