Introducing Auden Schendler — Part I: Those quotes in Businessweek’s “Little Green Lies”
Climate Progress is happy to introduce Auden Schendler as a guest blogger. Auden is Executive Director for Community and Environmental Responsibility at Aspen Skiing Company. Named a “Climate Crusader” in TIME magazine’s 2006 special issue on climate change, Auden once worked for Amory Lovins at Rocky Mountain Institute (as I did). You can read his full bio here. Auden has unique insight into the difficulties of corporate sustainability in the absence of government leadership and a price for carbon. Welcome, Auden!
Recently, Businessweek covered Aspen Skiing Company’s work on emissions reduction as part of an article titled “Little Green Lies.” The article has received considerable coverage in the blogosphere because it addresses the gap between rhetoric and reality when it comes to business claims on the environment.
Joe asked me if I’d like to clarify that story, and I jumped at the opportunity.
My main point, which probably didn’t get across in the article, is that even at a remarkably progressive company like Aspen Skiing Company, which has strong support from ownership, management, and staff, cutting CO2 emissions is very difficult. Imagine how hard it must be in most standard businesses that don’t have this level of buy-in! This statement may seem obvious, but it cuts against conventional wisdom. Most entities involved in emissions reduction have a stake in saying it’s profitable, relatively easy, and sometimes fun. The NGO community makes its living on this perspective. The government needs its own programs to look good. And corporations have a stake in their perceived success as well.
But it doesn’t help the business community to hear a pollyanish message. In fact, it’s damaging. When you’re told “this will be a no brainer,” and it isn’t, you’re more discouraged than before. The sell should instead be “reducing carbon emissions can be arduous, expensive, and difficult, but we have to do it. And in the long run, it’s going to be good for your business.”
The reason cutting emissions is difficult is that there are multiple and conflicting barriers to implementing these reductions that you can’t see coming. For example: if you have limited capital to invest in a given year, and you have to replace a leaky roof, a ski lift that might fail, and carpet that’s worn out, these projects may trump, and then delay, emissions reduction projects. That doesn’t mean your company is bad or unmotivated around green issues; it means you’re in a business trying to stay in business. The BW article quotes my friends Eric Calderon and Don Schuster, both of whom have voiced some of the real world barriers to change. Eric, one of the better 5-star hoteliers in the country, has pointed out that many high-end guests simply won’t tolerate fluorescent lighting. Equally bad, such lighting might even jeopardize a hotel’s 5 star rating. (AAA says it won’t, but can you blame Eric? WHAT IF the ambiance affects the inspector? Losing a five star rating is the apocalypse to a hotel manager. Spending a bit more on energy is not.)
Eric is a not an ogre for pointing that out–he’s a smart businessman. (Eric, by the way, now works at Auberge Resorts in CA, and has commissioned energy audits for all his properties.) Don Schuster, who has done more progressive green building than anyone at Aspen Skiing Company, including buildings that beat energy code by 50% using ground-source heat pumps, rightly points out that new technology may or may not offer the promise its package claims. He’s taken some hits when our ground source system had operational problem. But he stands by it. He’s a green manager trying to run a business where every capital expense means something else gets put off for another year.
What’s the upshot of this reality? When businesses cut emissions, they hit the high-ROI projects first, get a lot of (well deserved) credit for it, and then don’t ever drill down to achieve the next 70% of reduction necessary to solve the climate problem. That’s the root of my frustration: I don’t think business can solve climate change without significant help from the government, probably in the form of a price on carbon that reflects its true cost. Let’s be honest about that.
In my next blog, I’ll talk about RECs: there are good RECs, and bad ones. The difference matters. And in the last in this series, I’ll talk about what Aspen Skiing Company is going to do next on the climate front.
– Auden S.
October 29th, 2007 at 11:40 am
Auden,
Welcome aboard. I commend you on your commitment on the corporate level. One of the pleasant surprises of incorporating even the smallest business is the importance of community involvement in the formation of business relationships and corporate friendships. Reducing CO2 emissions in a business that requires its customers to travel great distances often by private jet is indeed a noble undertaking. You demonstrate that maximizing “green” is good, that’s not to say easy, business.
You write that we need a price on carbon that reflects its true cost. Don’t you really mean a price on CO2 emissions. Currently carbon is traded and heavily taxed at all levels of production and distribution. Perhaps you would like to add additional taxes and penalties to reach a price sufficient to make alternatives competitive. I contend the price of carbon based energy is irrelevant to the task at hand. The approach should concentrate on CO2 since that is the cause of the catastrophic events predicted by Joe’s book and website. Carbon and CO2 should not be confused. An effective global CO2 cap & trade market, though desirable and possible, is some years off. A market limited to the U.S. -or even including Canada and western Europe - would reduce our emissions but have little effect on worldwide concentrations. U.S. CO2 emissions were actually down last year. The pending energy bill contains a 15% reduction in the short term, a reachable figure. Alternatives and efficiencies are the only solutions immediately available.
Aspen Skiing Company may be at the limits of what they can do within the confines of their business. Congrats to them for their efforts. Now they can reach out. They can bring down the cost of PV cells by giving some away perhaps to a school or library or museum. They could invest some of their profits in wind and solar farms. Oh, I can think of many ways to spend someone else’s money.
October 29th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
Auden didn’t mention something that may be obvious, but I think it is worth saying anyway. One reason business has a hard time doing something about greenhouse gas emissions is the lack of a level playing field. Let’s imagine for the moment that most of Aspen Skiing Company’s competitors woke up one day and decided they do wanted to reduce their emissions. But most is not enough. It only takes a few holdouts that take advantage of the ability to push their costs of operation onto others (”externalities” in economics jargon) to destroy the efforts of even a majority of right-thinking businesses. By getting a public subsidy (e.g. by destroying a common resource such as the atmosphere) these holdouts reduce their costs and make it difficult for the others to make a profit, and without profit the others cannot stay in business. This is why voluntary programs cannot work. The cheap pushes out the good, and very often the cheap are depending on subsidies from the commons to be cheap. Emitting greenhouse gases is a subsidy to which too many businesses are addicted.
It is also worth noting how the outcome of the fluorescent conversion project Auden proposed to his management might have been different if Aspen were in a state with electric utility profits based upon efficiency instead of revenue. California has such a program, and its utilities could well have provided the money for such a retrofit. Combining all the savings at their millions of customers, such retrofits would be viewed at the Public Utilities Commission as the equivalent of building a new power plant, but one that produces electricity at $0.01 or $0.02 per kWh instead of $0.05 to $0.15 per kWh. That’s a good deal for the ratepayers, and so the utility would be rewarded with higher profits and the ratepayer with rates not rising and the planet with temperatures rising less.
October 29th, 2007 at 5:41 pm
As usual, Earl is right on, and as a good reminder, last week, I attended the Dow Jones VentureWire Alternative Energy Innovations conference:
http://alternativeenergy.dowjones.com/
Peter A. Darbee Chairman, President & CEO, PG&E Corporation, was one of a bunch of good speakers. He described all the things they’re doing to help save energy, and was quite explicit: do not serious energy savings until state PUCs decouple profits and amount of energy sold in ways akin to California’s… He was well-informed and quite articulate.
http://www.pge.com/
[Note: while Dow Jones publishes the Wall Street Journal, this conference, as well as WSJ news, have nothing to do with WSJ OpEd, whose opinions on this topic are different.
The whole Journal Report section today was overall pretty good, on energy and environment.]
October 29th, 2007 at 5:51 pm
Oops, another good thing today in the press:
Teh San Jose Mercury news devoted its entire Opinion page to an interview with CA Attorney General Jerry Brown and VMware CEO Diane Green. Jerry was his usual inimitable self.
Diane is a very thoughtful person who definitely works on this(from personal experience). She noted cooperation with PGE, which actually gives rebates for computer server virtualization (what VMware does), because it saves energy, and also described what Vmware did in building their new campus.
However, the broader story was the need for both government and business to do their parts.
This was a much better use of the column inches than printing “Global warming is a hoax” letters to editor!
October 29th, 2007 at 6:21 pm
I have a friend who is an accountant and works in auditing for a company. He travels ½ the time in a department of 8. They all travel ½ the time, except the boss.
I suggested to him that they change how they did things. Instead of sending two or more to a location, send one person who electronically copies all the paper work and then have that person do all the non-paperwork stuff. The electronically copied stuff could be sent to the office and then have most of the work done at the home office instead of at the location.
My friend thought about it for 5 minutes and said it would reduce travel in the office by ½ to 2/3rds. He is not going to suggest doing it that way because he makes a lot more money in a department that has high turnover because of all the travel. They have to pay him more to keep some experience in the department. He doesn’t mind it as much, but most everybody else only lasts a couple of years.
He’s got super duper flyer miles.
My own experience with companies is that I was put on some trips that could have been done as well with some creative thinking and phone calls.
Not to say that all business travel is that way, but we all get into habits, humans and companies run by humans.
October 29th, 2007 at 8:36 pm
Auden, I hope that Part II (or Part III) of your post will deal with RECs. That to me was something I wanted to hear more about after reading the Business Week article, especially the part that went:
‘In private, he pushed REC brokers for hard evidence that new wind capacity was being built. Their evasiveness gnawed at him. He asked veterans in the renewable energy field whether his marketing message was legitimate. “They laughed at me,” he says.’
November 5th, 2007 at 9:44 pm
Mr. Schendler writes,
“Eric, one of the better 5-star hoteliers in the country, has pointed out that many high-end guests simply won’t tolerate fluorescent lighting. Equally bad, such lighting might even jeopardize a hotel’s 5 star rating.”
Well Eric, you could just consider those ratings a 5 point suppository. But keep this kind of information coming. It is delightful to see how the other .01% live. Examples like these are invaluable. We never have enough rope.
November 6th, 2007 at 11:45 am
Auden, Hey, I was hoping you could enlighten us with a carbon footprint of making snow during the dryyyyyyyyy, unseasonably warrrrrrrrrrrrrrm months in high deserts of Colorado. While you’re at it how about the carbon footprint of an $80.00 lift pass.
Best, Jeff Maus