Mindy S. Lubber's articles

Now that the climate bill is in hibernation, it would be easy to assume that the US power sector will resume its tradition of burning high-polluting coal to sell increasing amounts of electricity.

The Washington Post opted for such a conclusion in an 8/23 article, "More coal plants are under construction." The article noted that "dozens" of old-style coal plants - 32, to be exact - have been built since 2008 or are under construction.

But there was an important context missing: The article failed to note that wind power production was the largest source of new electricity in the US last year and that for every new coal plant built in the US in recent years, four proposed coal plants have been cancelled or delayed.

The reality is the US power sector is undergoing a dramatic transformation to decarbonize its energy offerings and sell less, not more, electricity.

Despite a global financial meltdown tied to reckless risk-taking, I'm hearing a disturbing trend in advance of upcoming annual shareholder meetings: Most companies are still paying executives in ways that foster short-termism at the expense of long-term sustainability.

I recently spoke at a Financial Times conference in New York about how sustainability is a central corporate governance issue, but left there only partially encouraged. Major investors like John Wilson of TIAA-CREF and Brian Rice of the California State Teachers' Retirement System (CalSTRS) described the innovative ways they’ve made sustainability a part of their company engagement and proxy voting policies.

But these were the exceptions — most companies are still not talking with investors and their boards about sustainability.

Colorado, a clean energy hotbed, is creating thousands of new green jobs despite the climate cold war in Washington.

Two dozen business leaders held a Race for American Jobs event in Denver a couple of weeks ago (the campaign hits Manchester, N.H., today and ends in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday), and the stories I heard there took my breath away.

I met war veterans who once crawled through attics in Iraq searching for terrorists who are now tracking down air leaks that need insulation in Colorado residents' attics. Denver-based Veterans Green Jobs has landed more than 100 green jobs for local veterans in the past year alone — and it's looking to triple that number in 2010.

Boulder County's new ClimateSmart program, which provides energy efficiency and renewable energy loans for homeowners and businesses, has supported nearly $10 million of projects in just its first six months.

The climate accord announcement is legitimately catching some heat for being too little, too late. The enormity of the crisis cries out for strong binding pollution reduction targets by all countries and massive infusions of public and private capital to catalyze a fast-track transition to a low-carbon economy.

But expecting we’d get all this at COP15 was never realistic. That’s why leading U.S. businesses such as Nike, PG&E and North Face are encouraged by these first positive steps from Copenhagen.

It's all about the money these last days in the Danish capital, and one key question is being asked: How on earth do you build and finance a robust and credible global carbon market?

On buses, in hallways, in long lines outside the Bella Center, participants are all talking about the explosion in financing and carbon trading that is needed to dramatically reduce the pollution causing climate change.

The "financing" part is easy to understand. We need more spending on carbon-reducing activities, a lot more spending. Significantly more public and private financing is needed to deploy energy-saving, low-carbon technologies on the global scale needed.

Eighty-five to 90 percent of that financing will have to be from private sources such as investment banks, public pension funds and other global investors who control many trillions of dollars. Unfortunately, many of the negotiators here do not want to acknowledge this.

The hallways at the international climate summit at Copenhagen are crawling with big private investors who are ready to open their wallets to solve the climate crisis.

And there are plenty of folks trying to get their attention — among those, 13-year-old Litha Maqungo of Capetown, South Africa.

"Climate change will bring too much pain and suffering with droughts famines and floods," Litha, speaking in a slow powerful voice, told a group of 100 investors at a dinner last week.

In Washington, it's a popular climate conundrum everyone talks about: Even if the U.S. lowers its greenhouse gas emissions, China and India are on track to dwarf the entire western world's as they build enormous coal-fired power plants. Politicians of all stripes regularly say we must get China and India to use less coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, to power their emerging economies.

But who do you think is financing all these new coal plants in the developing world?

Try the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and other international public financial institutions supported by the world's wealthiest nations.

That's right. While the industrialized world is struggling to cut its emissions and gearing up to negotiate a new international climate treaty in Copenhagen this December, it is simultaneously bankrolling the construction of thousands upon thousands of megawatts of new coal-fired power in developing countries.

Flashy billboards are usually not my thing, but it's hard not to be grabbed by the 67-by-32-foot billboard unveiled yesterday outside New York City's Penn Station.

Deutsche Bank launched the world's first "Carbon Counter," an electronic display that digitally shows the real-time, cumulative pollution we are emitting that is causing the planet to heat up. Half a million people will see the billboard daily, and millions more can do so online at know-the-number.com.

The Carbon Counter vividly drives home a vital point not only about climate change – 800 tons of carbon pollution is going into the atmosphere every second – but about a short-sighted economic system that is burdening our planet like never before: We haven't been honestly accounting for the environmental costs of everything we do.

Aesop got it wrong. In "The Boy Who Cried Wolf," the townsfolk stopped believing repeated false alarms of danger. But in real life, we seem to jump time after time at the same shrill cries.

The alarmists, again, are the entrenched industry and the well-heeled national Chamber of Commerce warning of the dangers of tougher energy and environmental regulations.

Rather than join forward-thinking business leaders in meeting our challenges, these special interests fall back on their old refrain that tougher regulations will hurt business and thus the country.

They say the energy bill being debated in Congress will harm the economy. They say the president's tougher fuel standards are as far as they can go. They say we should not move so boldly to switch our ambitions – and incentives – from the old polluting industries to new renewable forms of energy. Unfortunately, some in Congress parrot their lines.

Do we need more proof of the consequences of the failure of diligent oversight than our current economic morass? The old cry that regulations are bad for business has helped sink our stock market, erase $11 trillion in wealth, ground our economy to a virtual halt, and left 14 million Americans out of work. 

If we must have more proof, let's look back at the record of truthfulness of big industry claims:

Tom Benson, owner of the World's Largest Laundromat in Berwyn, Ill., is tired of listening to conservative industry groups' bluster that climate change legislation is bad for business.

That's because clean energy saved his.

When Benson bought his business a decade ago, all that hot water helping scrub everything from Speedos to sheets ate up a staggering 25 percent of total monthly revenues. With 153 washers using thousands of gallons of hot water daily, you can only imagine the energy costs. And that's before factoring in the 148 dryers.

So to cut his natural gas costs, Benson installed a solar hot water system on his roof. Three dozen 10-by-4-foot solar panels now produce more than 2,400 gallons of hot water daily, saving him some $25,000 a year.

"Our energy bills could have sunk this business," says Benson. "Now, they're a source of pride."

That's why Benson joined 10,000 small business leaders – hundreds of them U.S. Chamber of Commerce members – in signing Moveon.org's petition last week asking the chamber to stop lobbying against the Waxman-Markey clean energy bill. The small biz shout-out echoes the dozens of major U.S. companies already calling for strong policies to build a 21st century clean energy economy.