The terms veteran and ancient refer to a tree’s stage of life. An ancient tree is one that has past its full maturity and is declining in health due to old age. A veteran tree is one that is mature but has not reached the ‘ancient’ stage. The crown of an ancient tree reduces in size and sheds unnecessary parts while the whole tree may fall prey to fungi the speeds its demise. This stage of the tree’s life often results in tree hollowing, falling branches and loose bark.

A tree in this last stage of its life may still stand and be an asset for a long time. In fact, under favourable conditions a tree may survive in its ‘ancient’ stage longer than at any other phase of its life. Determining the fate of old trees depends on the effects those trees will have if they fall on their own and the benefit they present by remaining upright. This is true regardless of whether a tree is in a garden, a park, or forest although the criteria used to determine the risks and the values a tree presents are different.

In addition to protecting property from damage incurred by falling trees, protect trees from other trees and evaluating the health of a habitat, a tree survey is also conducted to protect trees from people. Some trees are protected by law and cannot be cut down without a permit. Additionally, because land development can damage individual trees as well as change environmental conditions to the point of altering habitats, tree surveys are often necessary before land can be developed.

What a tree survey contains:

• Species of tree (usually referred to by its Latin name)

• Age of tree

• Life expectancy

• Health of tree

• Physical dimensions of tree

• Recommendations

Who uses tree surveys?

• Developers

• Home-owners

• Landscaper designers

• Lumber companies

Tree surveys are conducted by arboriculturalists who label trees with special tags containing numbers. Those numbers refer back to a special summary table which revels information to the lay person. Qualified arboriculturalists will be able to explain their conclusions regarding one tree or a stand of trees in an easy to understand manner. It is their job to use the information gleaned from a tree survey to determine the best course of action to safely make the most of a valuable resource: trees.

Old growth forest photo from Shutterstock

This post generously sponsored by Arbtech. Interested in sponsoring an article on The Inspired Economist? Check out our sponsored post guidelines here.

But action is not always in line with attitude. Many programs designed to encourage what many would think are “no brainer” sustainable behavior, like installing a high efficiency showerhead, fail to achieve significant adoption rates.

Doug McKenzie Mohr, environmental psychiatrist, and author of Fostering Sustainable Behavior, suggests the answer is Community Based Social Marketing (CBSM). CBSM proceeds in 5 steps:

1. Selecting behaviors you want to change
2. Uncovering barriers & benefits
3. Developing strategies
4. Piloting the strategy
5. Implement broadly and evaluate

Step 1: Selecting Behaviors

The first step in creating change is to select behaviors that you’d like to see changed. But rather than officials simply saying they’d like to see one particular behavior or another change, it’s better, according to McKenzie Mohr, to prioritize community programs and choose behaviors that will have the biggest effect. To do this, it’s critical to start with the broader scale data.

There are several important factors in selecting behaviors. One is that they’re non-divisible. So saying something like “we want to encourage people to plant native plants” is simply too general. There are too many types of native plants, some of which might actually be more water-thirsty than others. So any behavior needs to be drilled down as far as possible.

The second factor is to focus on the “end state”. Thus, a program where a municipality hands out energy efficient light bulbs will be less effective than a program where that municipality makes people bring in 10 incandescent bulbs to receive their replacement bulbs. In essence, the action has been taken, and “end state” achieved. And lastly, and perhaps most difficult, is not to use “strategies”. A strategy would be “we want people to take shorter showers.” Nice, but ineffective compared to end-state focused, non-divisible outcomes like “we want 75% of residents to change to a high efficiency showerhead”.

The next thing to consider in terms of selecting behaviors is how rigorous the selection criteria.

The selection criteria include three elements:

To identify the biggest impact areas, a strong approach is to look at the data. In Canada, Mohr said, 59% of electricity is used for heating space. So much attention is paid to lights, but when researchers looked at the data in Canada, only 5% of the total energy used was being used for lights. So any programs aimed at lights can only change a few percent overall, whereas programs aimed at heating can have a much bigger impact. In Hawaii, clearly this would be quite different, so programs designed without this data review are bound to be less effective.

A weaker approach is to survey experts. You can find a lot of folks willing to give you input, but the data will be suspect to each person’s inherent biases and backgrounds. Good data, but definitely not the strongest approach.

To identify the changes with the highest probability of adoption, a strong approach is to look at case studies. What has worked elsewhere? How did those changes come about? A weaker approach is to survey people and ask them how many of them, for instance, would give up driving by themselves in favor of taking public transit. McKenzie Mohr’s website, www.cbsm.com, has many case studies from around the world on any number of initiatives.

To identify the best possible overall outcome, you’ll want to find areas with low penetration. Figure it this way. If 75% of people have already installed a high efficiency showerhead, you can only penetrate the market 25% more (and to be honest, those 25% are likely going to come around eventually anyway, since everyone else is doing it).

Next Page (2 of 3), Step 2: Uncovering Barriers and Benefits to Social Change (step 2 of 5).

But the behavior often doesn’t follow the attitude, and it is perhaps the biggest missing link in creating real sustainable change. In the introductory workshop about Fostering Sustainable Behavior, Doug McKenzie Mohr described three programs that tried to help people turn their attitudes into behaviors.

First, an educator invited forty people to an energy efficiency workshop, and created a value perception by limiting attendees to the first forty people that called. The energy efficiency workshop educated people about how to save money on their energy bills and gave them a list of recommendations they could do in their homes. 40 people took the workshop. Of those, just 1 lowered hot water heater temp. 2 had wrapped their water heater in an insulating blanket. Only 8 of the 40 installed a high efficiency showerhead (and there was no price barrier–all 40 were given the high efficiency showerheads during the workshop).

The second program included a water-wise program, where participants were sent mailers about wasteful water use, the water-energy relationship, and conservation methods that would help them not only reduce their water bills, but also their impact. Net result? None.

The third program included surveys sent to a large proportion of residents, 94% of whom acknowledged that we all had a part to play in cleaning up litter. The researchers then placed litter right in front of the person’s front door, so they’d see it first thing in the morning when they left the house. The result? 2% of the people picked up the litter.

So what about doing the job for people? Programs in the U.S. to do energy audits and make concentrated recommendation lists to folks have seen little to no results. The government spent $760 per house, many billions of dollars, to provide free energy audits for households. In addition, to facilitate action, they also offered low/no interest loans for retrofits and a list of qualified contractors that could do things like insulation, weatherization, and the like. The results? Only 6% of people requested audits. Of those, only half acted on the recommendations given by the auditors. Total savings? 2-3%.

To make matters worse, people on the waiting list ended up doing 30% of the changes and upgrades before the audit came anyway. So overall, only 1% of the actual energy savings could be attributed to the program at all.

So how do we create more effective behavioral change programs? Check out Effective behavior change programs for sustainability, a 3 page summary of Doug McKenzie Mohr’s workshop on effective community based social marketing.

Photo from EnergyChangeMN on Flickr Creative Commons

First, the printer. I had an Epson all-in-one printer/copier/scanner that was about 2 years old. Just recently, I had a piece of paper jam in the gears, and when I tried to pull it out, a corner of the piece of paper tore off. I was unable to recover the torn piece, and while it measured just about a half inch by half inch, it made the printer stop functioning entirely. Not only could I not print anything, I couldn’t scan or copy anything, either, even though neither of those functions requires the printer gears to move.

So I got on the Epson help page. Here’s the solution they present.

This oversimplification yielded no results. The tiny little scrap of paper was jammed in the gears, further down than either of these areas. So I began to take the printer apart, thinking, surely, a few screws will open it up and allow me to fish out the 1 inch square scrap of paper. No dice. I removed a dozen or so screws, and was able to remove one hinge from the unit, but nothing I did gave me access to the gears. Surely, this is where most paper jams occur, right?

With no luck there, I decided to see if there was someone trained locally to provide a fix. Epson has a link to qualified service center referrals. The closest one? About 2500 miles away.

I live in Hawaii, so this is not abnormal, but there isn’t even a service center in the city of San Francisco. So…having an Epson serviced is not really an option either.

At this point, I’m starting to think that Epson designs its printers for the dump. This is literally the first paper jam that we weren’t able to extract that we’ve had since we bought the printer, and this…is the end? One paper jam? One 1-inch square piece of printer paper? And that’s it?

So I began to research. Well, as it turns out, Epson is aware of the term “product lifecycle”. So that’s a good starting point. Their CSR page boldly proclaims:

With focus placed on a product’s entire life cycle, elements that form the foundation for an environmentally conscious product are incorporated during the product planning and design stages.

In addition, their website is full of images showcasing green leaves, gentle hands, and little green cars and factories. Ah, yes, the first sign of greenwashing is how much you spend in graphic design making the iconography, as they say.

Digging in a little deeper, Epson points out its three main tenets when designing products with the environment in mind. First is energy-saving design. “We set energy conservation goals for each product and work to ensure steady progress.” Second is resource saving. “During the design stage, efforts are also made to reduce impacts through product size and weight reductions…” And finally, elimination of harmful substances. All good considerations, though most of this is simply compliance with existing regulations around toxic substances, or a way for Epson to reduce its shipping costs. Designing for energy efficiency is good as well, but that’s likely more an effort to make sure that countries and companies with sustainable procurement policies don’t leave Epson in the dust rather than a real effort at making energy efficient products. As evidence of this, just consider that it took Epson 7 years to join EPEAT (the eco-label that signifies a product is more energy efficient).

When compared to Hewlett Packard, a competitor, it’s clear that Epson is lagging. Find The Best ranked HP a 4.09 (out of 5) in green rating, and Epson at 1.36. Hmm. The company is only 60% transparent compared to HP’s 90%, and, to make matters worse, it’s also an energy hog. Dividing sales by energy used, HP just about quadruples Epson’s productivity per energy used. Its water efficiency is worse. HP outpaces Epson 14:1 in sales per water used.

In terms of life cycle analysis, it’s hard to imagine anything that would be a bigger impact than having to dispose of the entire 25 pound printer, plastic, metal, gears, electronics, and all, simply because of the very first, single little paper jam. But that’s the situation I’m in. I’m off to Best Buy to drop off this e-waste, and can only hope that Epson hears my customer survey or finds this article and decides to get on board with true sustainable design.

I think, as environmentalists, we’d like to see people, altruistically, care about things that [we think] matter. Species extinction. Global climate patterns that are going to create millions of environmental refugees and spawn war and bloodshed. Ever dwindling wild places. But reality hits, and we realize that that’s pie in the sky. As a result of backlash against environmentalism as an elitist agenda, the sustainability movement has shifted its communication tactics to get more personal. Connecting the dots from people’s utility bills to the effects on polar bears, for example. Same ends, more or less…very different, and perhaps more effective means.

But yet…it appears that some people simply don’t seem to care that they’re dousing themselves in chemicals every day, paying through the nose to drive fuel-inefficient vehicles, working themselves to the bone to afford the luxury of sitting in traffic, and eating nothing but chemical-laden GMO junk food while dealing with one health crisis after another.

And if we can’t reach folks on those grounds, how on earth are we ever going to make real change, globally? Well, it might be that I’m still not quite good at communicating effectively to elicit real behavior change.

An upcoming workshop in Honolulu May 13th-15th with Dr. McKenzie Mohr aims to change all that. Mohr is the author of Fostering Sustainable Behavior and Social Marketing to Protect the Environment: What Works. The introductory workshop, May 13th, will give attendees “sufficient knowledge to use community-based social marketing to develop successful programs to foster sustainable behavior.” It will cover five steps in the process: selecting behaviors, identifying barriers, developing strategies, conducting pilots, and broad scale implementation.

The advanced workshop, offered May 14th-15th, will take this knowledge to a much deeper level, including “exciting new developments regarding habit formation”. Participants will be coached in making community-based social marketing presentations to their own agencies or communities to help elicit widespread behavior change toward sustainability.

Check out the workshop agenda and registration information here: https://www.htfsolutions.com/forms/mma/index.htm

When I posted this story, I was soundly chastised and called a “nuclearist” by more than a few, while tallying support from some who know far more about nuclear energy and safe reactions than I do.

Because knowledge is so very important, I believe it is time to repost parts of this article now so all readers might understand the daunting nature of our global energy demands, the effects of climate change, and the terrifying amount of radioactive waste that happens to be lying around on the soil of our planet, or far below the surface.

Let me start with this: Renewable and sustainable energy solutions should be championed by all whenever the occasion presents itself. But clean solutions like these fall far short of addressing planetary needs. During 2012 renewable energy from wind and solar accounted for 13.2 percent of U.S electricity supplies (we still don’t have comprehensive accounting for what happens to solar energy when the sun isn’t shining, or wind turbines when the wind isn’t blowing.)

Unfortunately the renewable energy solution as it stands today is a far, far distance from taking the driver’s seat among energy suppliers. And that’s just in the United States. These numbers drop precipitously when calculating a world-scale supply chain. Which leads us back to a robust global marketplace that steadfastly supports a deluge of more fossil fuels to sate demand and satisfy the pocketbook – this and climate change are cankerous problems that still aren’t being correctly addressed. Even the most naive already suspect our fossil fuel addiction has a key responsibility in stoking the fires of global climate change. What other options, then exist? Integral fast reactors should be added to this list.

We need to understand all options on the table or planetary energy, including nuclear. Below is an abbreviated gist of that article:

Guardian columnist George Monbiot and his column – A Waste of Waste – is a document that should be read by all persons with an interest in our planet’s energy requirements, regardless of their position on nuclear energy following the ongoing problems taking place at Japan’s Fukoshima nuclear facility.

Monbiot, an environmental crusader, has asked an important question regarding our management of nuclear waste: “Why bury nuclear waste, when it could meet the world’s energy needs?”

He cites the important, must-read 2008 book by environmentalist Tom Blees, “Prescription for the Planet” where he presents information from studies from scientists about the remarkable, yet untapped potential of integral fast reactors (short form – IFRs) that were developed at the Argonne National Laboratory between 1984 and 1994 before being shut down and dismantled under U.S. Congressional order.

A huge problem for the people of this planet: The enormous amount of waste generated from the manufacture of nuclear weapons.

Blees obtained information from scientists who worked on the Integral Fast Reactor Project, arguing there are nuclear power stations which can run on what old nuclear plants have left behind.Conventional nuclear power uses just 0.6% of the energy contained in the uranium that fuels it. Integral fast reactors can use almost all the rest.

Blees says our global nuclear waste — all of that stuff we don’t know how to safely throw away — can meet the world’s energy needs for several hundred years, with little in the way of carbon emissions.(See Blees’ insightful 27-minute interview on You Tube.)

Science claim on IFRs: IFRs need to be loaded with fissile material (uranium-233, uranium-235, and plutonium-239) only once, after which they can keep recycling ever more of its energy, until a small fraction of the waste remains.

Renewable energy can and should be a dynamic part of this world’s sustainable energy solutions. It is unable to scale up to the demand for electricity anywhere near fast enough. In an interview, Blees refers to a Scientific American study regarding meeting our electrical demand with solar energy which surmised we needed 39,000 square miles of solar panels just to meet 69 percent of electrical demand in the United States.

Monbiot concludes with this sobering, but accurate perspective: “So we environmentalists have a choice. We can’t wish the waste away. Either it is stored and then buried. Or it is turned into mox fuels. Or it is used to power IFRs.”

A growing number of people need to study and share this concern.

Recent articles for those wanting to learn:
Fast Neutron Reactors
Frontline Interview with Dr. Charles Till, Co-Developer of the IFR
The Fast Reactor – SCGI
The Case for Near-term Commercial Demonstration of the Integral Fast Reactor
The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) – an Unfulfilled Promise

Photo: Science Council for Global Initiatives, Argonne National Lab

A brighter future?

Given their massive online presence, Google need to constantly use energy in order for their search site and spinoffs, including Google Plus to work 24/7; but that can take its toll on their energy bills as well as the wider environment. The decision by the search giants to go green could give their rivals reason to follow suit.

To date, Google has invested just over $1bn in green technology which even for a firm of its size looks like a staggering amount. But why invest so much? Perhaps the main reason behind Google’s bold decision is that they’re trying to improve their data centers’ energy efficiency, and using green technology can play a significant role in that.

A question of cost

One of the major issues that all companies, including Google, will probably have to face up to in the near future is the cost of gas and electricity. Reliance on fossil fuels will eventually end up falling due to coal, oil, natural gas and other fossil fuels being finite resources, and the need for clean alternatives will grow considerably in the next few decades.

Preparing for the future at all costs is something Google seems willing to do, and it’s possible that more and more companies might do the same. Renewable energy is seen as key to the world’s future economic prospects, as older forms of energy like coal and gas become antiquated and eventually unfit for use.

Covering all bases

Google’s massive investment in green energy has gone towards a number of large-scale projects across the US and overseas. $200m alone was spent on a wind farm in Texas, while other projects in Iowa and California using photovoltaic (PV) solar panels are helping to meet the company’s commitment to green energy, while contributing a large amount to different communities.

Many of their projects are highly ambitious, not least SolarCity, where thousands of residential properties will receive rooftop solar panels. Whether or not it and other projects will actually make a difference remain to be seen, but Google’s ideas are likely to receive widespread admiration.

Katy Jones of Dulas Ltd said of the initiative, “Google’s high energy useage makes them a prime candidate for implementing many renewable energy technologies. Solar is already hugely popular in California and uptake will increase considerably with the addition of Google’s project. Google should be applauded for taking such a bold step to address their future energy consumption needs.”

This post was supported by Dulas, a renewable energy engineering firm with 30+ years experience. UK businesses with high energy use can find out more about Dulas’ services and how renewable energy can help them offset their bills by contacting 01654 705060.

Photo from Shutterstock

Clean your refrigerator condenser coils

Most people don’t even know what condenser coils are (or what they do), and that’s totally ok. The only thing you need to understand is that when your condenser coils get a bunch of dust and grime on them, the fridge has to work harder to keep cooler. If you have an older fridge, and you lament that it just doesn’t quite get as cold as it used to, odds are, the condenser coils just need a cleaning.

Savings: 15-20% of the electricity your fridge uses.

How: Here’s how.

Clean your dryer vent

Similar to the fridge, your clothes dryer also collects dust (mostly in the form of “lint”, also formerly known as your clothes). Most folks know that you should clean out your lint screen, but there’s a whole lot more. Underneath the lint screen area, there’s a whole lot more that could be hiding. Here’s a short video on how to clean that out, for maximum efficiency.

But wait…there’s more. Not cleaning out the lint can lead to major expense, in the form of fires. Here’s a video on that…with further instructions on how to clean out the venting duct system after the 3 minute mark, to bring your dryer to optimum use efficiency.

See more eco-friendly clothes care tips here.

Clothes drying rack from Fieryspirit on Flickr Creative Commons

We’ve argued here on The Inspired Economist before that GDP is not a good measure of an economy’s well-being, and further, that it is a very poor measure of the new economic realities we face, regarding an ever-increasing population, dwindling natural resources, and economic and social externalities.

Many progressive economists have been pushing for a more holistic approach to measuring prosperity and progress, and have argued for the use of the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI). Rather than go into the GPI, I just suggest you check out our article: GDP vs GPI: Which measures the economy best?

Enter Gross National Happiness

GPI may have more economists backing it, but Gross National Happiness (GNH) garners far more interest in the general public. Could you really measure a country’s prosperity based on its citizens’ sense of quality of life? GNH has one more thing going for it that GPI does not: a country that has fully adopted it as its sole measure of economic activity. That country is Bhutan, a small, relatively isolated country at the base of the Himalayas in Asia. More on that in a moment.

While GDP measures just one thing (the flow of money), GNH measures four: good governance, sustainable socio-economic development, cultural preservation, and environmental considerations. For those really interested, the methodology is described in detail here on page 46-51 (pdf). But to sum up, GNH is “based on the Alkire-Foster method for measuring multidimensional concepts such as poverty, wellbeing or inequality.” It starts with survey research. People across Bhutan are surveyed about their satisfaction and happiness, and the sufficiency with which they feel happy with a variety of “domains”. So in essence, a question might ask a Bhutanese citizen how satisfied they are with their family’s access to enough healthy food as one of the domains (or indicators). Another might be their job situation. And another how good their access is to clean drinking water. At last count, there were 33 domains (indicators) that Bhutan is using in its GNH.

Once all the data have been gathered, aggregate scores are tallied across the domains for each person. If someone marks themselves as being “sufficient” in a majority of the domains, they’re generally considered happy.

(from A Short Guide to Gross National Happiness Index (PDF))

According to a report entitled “An Extensive Analysis of the GNH Index” (PDF), the cutoffs for these sufficiency measures (domains/indicators) are “imperfect and arbitrary” but the “concept [of not having "enough"] is well understood.” So effectively, if people don’t feel they have “enough” access to parks, that would count against their overall happiness. But tallied up with the other 32 indicators, that one measure alone wouldn’t make one count as “unhappy”.

So to calculate GNH, a novel approach is used. Those folks who are “happy” are pooled into one group (we’ll call this GroupH). Those who don’t make the cutoff are pooled into the other (GroupUn). As per the chart above, and quoting from the report: “a person is not required to achieve sufficiency in all indicators in order to be happy.” In other words, to get into GroupH, you’d have to have sufficiency in most of the indicators, but not all. I am a generally happy person, but I’m grotesquely insufficient in the number of yachts I own, so if that were one of the 33 indicators (it’s obviously not), I could still be counted as happy if I had sufficiency in many of the others. Bhutan uses sufficiency in 66% of indicators as the “cutoff” for putting people in GroupH. For those folks who don’t have sufficiency in at least 66% of the indicators, they’re placed in GroupUn.

But as a measure of society, it’s valuable to know more than just how many folks are in each group. So GroupUn is further subdivided so that deeply unhappy people don’t contribute much at all to overall GNH, but those who are marginally happy do contribute some.

GNH, then, is measured as the percent of people who have sufficiency in 66% or more of the domains, PLUS a fraction of the remainder. In the above example, 3 of 7 folks are happy. That’s 43%.

The remaining 57% are weighted.

As you can see, Jampel and Tashi have sufficiency in 5 of the 9 indicators (in this example, they’re just using 9 instead of 33 for simplicity sake), so they’re happier than Thinley, who only has sufficiency in 3 of the 9. So in GroupUn, the unhappy group, there is sufficiency in 17.6 of the 36 total indicators, or 48.9%.

So the headcount of folks in GroupUn, the unhappy (57%), is coupled in a fairly complex mathematical formula, with the average shortcoming of their unhappiness (48.9%) to get a metric for just how unhappy the unhappy are.

GNH, then is basically quantified by adding the two groups (GNH is measured on a scale from 0 to 1, basically to give an overall percentage of happiness in a country). To get the figure, you basically add how many people are happy to the folks who are unhappy multiplied by just how unhappy they are. If GroupUn is pretty much on the brink of happiness, then the overall Gross National Happiness that results is pretty high. If GroupUn is on the brink of total depression, then the overall Gross National Happiness will be very negatively affected by the depths of these folks unhappiness.

The Pursuit of Happiness: isn’t that what it’s all about anyway?

It’s a pretty elegant solution. After all, what’s life beyond the Pursuit of Happiness, right? Now that you know what GNH is, any measure of a society’s prosperity just based solely on financial transactions seems pretty…paltry. Doesn’t it?

While Bhutan is currently the only country using GNH, it is gathering momentum in many other places. GNH has been toyed with in Brazil and Canada, and has some support in the U.S. in the form of a nonprofit called Gross National Happiness USA. Locally, there are groups like Measure What Matters Vermont popping up everywhere and trying to push the agenda into local governments.

Learn more at GrossNationalHappiness.com

Precedent

First, precedent is good, but not at the scale of this endeavor. Historians have documented the power of divestment before, most notably in helping bring down the racist Apartheid government of South Africa. What’s commonly known by folks who follow this kind of thing is that widespread divestment of South African stocks helped bring significant pressure on the government there to begin negotiations that eventually led to the downfall of the Apartheid regime. Student organizers of the FossilFree campaign are looking to that precedent for inspiration:

What’s not as commonly known is how long it took for the process to work for justice in South Africa. It’s not clear when the concept first emerged, but it reached a fairly substantial scale in 1962, when the United Nations passed a resolution aimed at encouraging member nations to pull their money from South Africa in the form of economic sanctions.

The first University to use divestment as a direct strategy was Michigan State University, in 1978. By 1985, 9.2 billion Rand left South Africa as a result of sanctions and divestment. The economic pressures continued to mount, despite all attempts by those in power in South Africa at stopping the leak. But the time horizon, from 1962, to Michigan State in 1978, to the fall of Apartheid, was long. Apartheid did not fall until well over a decade after Michigan State divested. Those hoping for an end to fossil fuels due to university divestment should dig in for a long, but winnable fight.

Will people go for it?

Second, the big question is about return on investment. Many universities rely on solid financial returns in their investment portfolios to help carry them through times when alumni donations may be lean, or enrollments down. The good news is that there are many options to invest in sustainable companies, and the even better news is that the returns are good.

Investing in fossil fuels seems highly profitable at first glance. Exxon takes the headlines on that. But a report by Ceres indicates that returns on fossil fuels are volatile, and that many investments are actually incredibly risky. Just think about BP for a moment. Cruising along at a good ROI, then wham. Billions in costs, huge long term brand damage, executive turnover, Board resignations…

Even without a carbon tax or cap and trade, the business of dirty energy has incredible downside potential. Investment banks are increasingly wary, making credit tight. Investors are piling money into socially responsible investing, with many of them using a screen like “no fossil stocks”. BP’s stock took a huge dive after their Gulf disaster, and the cost of doing business in dirty energy would seem to only continue to rise.

In addition, people are increasingly seeing clean energy as a great investment.

This article continues…see page 2 of 2 by clicking here.