The 5th Annual Symposium on Sustainable Business- Profits and Politics: Sustainability and the Global Corporation

Posted on February 5, 2013 by AJaffe

pp-sustainable-global-corp

It has never been more important for a global corporation to follow sustainable business practices. Many corporate stakeholders, governments and NGO’s are calling for nothing less. At the same time, it has never been harder for multinational corporations to be sustainable. The increasingly complex national and international political landscape, mounting evidence of climate change, human rights and social issues, and an uncertain economic environment all pose real challenges to would-be sustainable corporations. This year’s Symposium will examine how multinational corporations are attempting to overcome these challenges. The Symposium will explore ESG, the acronym which describes the three areas of focus used – environment, social and governance – when measuring  and reporting on business sustainability and corporate social responsibility.

When: February 8th, 2013  from 9:00 am to 1:20 pm

Where: 151 East 25th St., 7th Floor, Room 750 (between Lexington and 3rd)

For more information about the agenda of this program and how to register, please click here or call Matthew LePere at 646-312-3231

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Students Aim at College Portfolios

Posted on December 13, 2012 by Luke Waltzer

To Stop Climate Change, Students Aim at College Portfolios

To Stop Climate Change, Students Look To Endwoment Portfolios

Students in Minneapolis, seeking steps to cut atmospheric carbon levels to 350 parts per million, known as the safe level.
By JUSTIN GILLIS
Published: December 4, 2012

SWARTHMORE, Pa. — A group of Swarthmore College students is asking the school administration to take a seemingly simple step to combat pollution and climate change: sell off the endowment’s holdings in large fossil fuel companies. For months, they have been getting a simple answer: no.As they consider how to ratchet up their campaign, the students suddenly find themselves at the vanguard of a national movement.

In recent weeks, college students on dozens of campuses have demanded that university endowment funds rid themselves of coal, oil and gas stocks. The students see it as a tactic that could force climate change, barely discussed in the presidential campaign, back onto the national political agenda.

“We’ve reached this point of intense urgency that we need to act on climate change now, but the situation is bleaker than it’s ever been from a political perspective,” said William Lawrence, a Swarthmore senior from East Lansing, Mich.

Students who have signed on see it as a conscious imitation of the successful effort in the 1980s to pressure colleges and other institutions to divest themselves of the stocks of companies doing business in South Africa under apartheid.

A small institution in Maine, Unity College, has already voted to get out of fossil fuels. Another, Hampshire College in Massachusetts, has adopted a broad investment policy that is ridding its portfolio of fossil fuel stocks. To read this entire article click here.

Posted in Daily News, Education, Sustainability in the News | 1 Comment

To Slow Warming, Tax Carbon

Posted on November 12, 2012 by Luke Waltzer

OpinionENVIRONMENT played only a modest role in the recent American presidential election. President Obama lauded his new fuel-efficiency standards and support for renewable energy sources, while Mitt Romney faulted the president for rising gasoline prices and new restrictions on coal mining.

But while environmentalists have lamented America’s slow response to climate change, the United States is actually on a much better path than Europe. It is making the transition from coal to gas, it is investing in new energy technologies, and its carbon emissions are falling faster than Europe’s.

This is not to paint too rosy a portrait. Since world leaders met in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 and agreed to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions of industrialized countries by about 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, virtually nothing has been done to slow the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In 1990, carbon emissions were rising at less than 2 parts per million per year. Now they are rising at nearly 3 p.p.m. per year.

How could so little have been achieved, despite all the already considerable economic costs of climate change? Europe, in particular, has put great effort into being a ”world leader” on climate change and has spent lots of money on wind farms and rooftop solar panels. Sadly, this has had almost no global effect.

To read the rest of this article please click here.

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Protecting the City, Before Next Time

Posted on November 8, 2012 by Luke Waltzer

The New York Times

By
Published: November 3, 2012

URBAN WETLANDS A rendering of Lower Manhattan that shows tidal marshes to absorb waves.

Arriving in Venice years ago, Robert Benchley, the New York journalist and wit, is said to have sent a mock-panicked telegram to his editor: ”Streets flooded. Please advise.”

After the enormous storm last week, which genuinely panicked New York with its staggering and often fatal violence, residents here could certainly identify with the first line of Benchley’s note. But what about the second?

If, as climate experts say, sea levels in the region have not only gradually increased, but are also likely to get higher as time goes by, then the question is: What is the way forward? Does the city continue to build ever-sturdier and ever-higher sea walls? Or does it accept the uncomfortable idea that parts of New York will occasionally flood and that the smarter method is to make the local infrastructure more elastic and better able to recover?

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Wednesday gave a sea wall the nod. Because of the recent history of powerful storms hitting the area, he said, elected officials have a responsibility to consider new and innovative plans to prevent similar damage in the future. ”Climate change is a reality,” Mr. Cuomo said. ”Given the frequency of these extreme weather situations we have had, for us to sit here today and say this is once in a generation and it’s not going to happen again, I think would be shortsighted.” Click here to finish reading this article.

Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

 

 

 

 

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Climate Policy Advances in the States, but Slowly

Posted on November 7, 2012 by Luke Waltzer
Ken James/BLOOMBERG

Ken James/BLOOMBERG

While Tuesday’s election may not break the national logjam over how to address climate change, a few states will take decisive action on energy policy in the coming week.

On Nov. 14, California will hold the nation’s largest-ever auction of carbon pollution allowances, requiring many of the state’s biggest utilities and manufacturers to either cut their greenhouse-gas output or buy permits to compensate for it. Michigan residents vote Tuesday on whether the state will require that 25 percent of its electricity be produced from renewable energy by 2025. And Washington state voters will choose as governor either Jay Inslee, a Democratic former congressman and outspoken proponent of carbon limits, or his Republican opponent, Rob McKenna, a two-term attorney general.

Four years ago, some policymakers and environmentalists predicted that the United States would lock in major cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions from multi-state initiatives in the West, Midwest and Northeast. That hasn’t exactly happened: The recession and the election of some Republican governors have curbed some of the most ambitious efforts to address climate change.

But the push to expand renewable energy, which would reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by producing electricity without burning fossil fuels, does continue on the state level. And California is pressing ahead — without the six states that initially planned to join it — with a trading system that will allow the state’s major carbon emitters to buy and sell pollution allowances.

To read the remainder of the story please click here.

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