Current Savers Blog

– Michael Brune is Executive Director of the Sierra Club, the largest grassroots environmental organization in the United States and author of Coming Clean: Breaking America’s Addiction to Oil and Coal. –

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, and people are looking back at an amazing 40 years of environmental successes. Americans have come together in their neighborhoods, cities, states and nationally to demand cleaner air and water – and they have been successful.

This should serve as an inspiration for the current and future work to help our planet and the challenges we face along the way. While our rivers were at one time catching fire, it is now our rapidly warming planet we turn the focus to.

Our country is chained to outdated, dirty energy sources such as coal and oil, which are in turn causing global warming. Burning coal for power creates 30 percent of our country’s global warming pollution – not to mention the health impacts it has on people and our land and water.

Pollution from coal plants adds $62 billion a year to health care costs, according to the National Academy of Sciences. Research from the American Lung Association shows that coal pollution causes more than 12,000 hospitalizations, 38,000 heart attacks and 24,000 deaths each year.

Coal is a bad investment. Instead of spending millions to artificially extend the life of the outdated coal fleet, we should take the opportunity to diversify our energy mix and to expand investments in existing clean energy technologies that can provide power without the dangerous and harmful effects of coal.

We can do better than energy sources that cause environmental and human health problems. A clean energy future not only fights global warming, but it’s also good for our economy. It’s time to phase out this old way of generating power and transition to clean energy technologies, like wind, solar and efficiency, that will power the future and create good-paying jobs for Americans.

It’s time to make our country more energy efficient, as well. We can save money right now by increasing the energy efficiency of our buildings, vehicles, appliances and more. Improving energy efficiency lowers energy bills, eliminates the need for new power plants, increases our energy independence, reduces air and water pollution and cuts the carbon emissions that cause global warming.

From gigantic multinational corporations to small, family-owned stores, businesses of all types are turning to energy efficiency to cut costs. By going green, they are realizing long-term savings that more than make up for the upfront expense.

Switching to clean energy creates jobs and boosts the economy, and clean energy technologies are available and already creating thousands of jobs around the country. According to an October 2009 study from Yale University, clean energy investments will create as many as 1.9 million jobs nationally by 2020.

Many of these clean energy jobs–building wind turbines, installing solar panels, renovating buildings to make them more energy efficient, constructing the Smart Grid–are jobs that can’t be outsourced and will make America a world economic leader.

As we face the environmental challenge of a generation in global warming, it is the time to demand less pollution, more jobs and greater security. It is time for a clean energy economy in the U.S.

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Photo shows people looking for small crabs in front of wind turbines that generate electricity in Gaomei Wetland in Taichung, Taiwan, Dec. 6, 2009. REUTERS/Nicky Loh

Changing the world is no doubt a daunting task but that’s what leftist Bolivian president Evo Morales and thousands of environmental activists, representatives of grassroots groups, and the envoys of some 90 governments are striving to do this week in the small village of Tiquipaya, in central Bolivia.

    The World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth started on Monday with a speech by Morales that was radical because it called for a new economic system, but was also peppered with some other surprises.
    Morales, an Aymara Indian who herded llamas as a boy and never finished secondary school, said that eating chicken fed with hormones causes “sexual deviation” in men and that European men lose their hair because they eat GM food.

    Overall, Morales’ speech was meant to stir dissent against capitalism.
    He said that consumerist lifestyle and global warming were cause and effect, and that the only way to stop temperatures from rising is to implement a economic model that he calls “vivir bien” or “to live well” – a political philosophy that draws from ancient indigenous traditions.
    “Humanity is at a crossroads and must choose whether to continue the path of capitalism and death or take the path of harmony with nature,” he said before a crowd of people in a soccer stadium under a blazing sun that left many – including this correspondent – wishing they had put on sun block.
    His message has struck a chord in thousands of people worried about global warming, who have travelled from all corners of the world to discuss a solution to what Morales likes to call “the climate crisis”. Bolivia has been among the most vocal opponents of the Copenhagen Accord, the non-binding deal from a summit in December backed by about 120 government and meant to keep any rise in temperatures below 2.0 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times.

    The mood of the summit is chill, with people dancing to traditional music in the streets around the conference buildings, posing for pictures with llamas or eating free meals provided by organizers.
    The meeting has been dubbed the Woodstock of climate summits because people are allowed in for free, and because there are ad-hoc music concerts, theater, artists painting murals and Indians peddling handcrafts or organic products.
    “They are taking into consideration the ancestral traditions of indigenous peoples, that is a very positive thing … but this could end being a sing-along, something folkloric,” said Kanasami Gutierrez, a 45-year-old Bolivian. 
    Many participants told me they feel upbeat about the summit because by speaking up they feel they are now part of a solution, rather than part of the problem.
    “World leaders should listen the people’s voice, and not the voice of the capital. We hope this will be the space to consolidate a large alliance of social groups from all over the world,” said Itelvina Masioli, from Brazil, and a member of Via Campesina, a global farmers’ network.
    Others fear that the summit could issue a package of resolutions that will be unfeasible and tainted with radical leftist rhetoric, and therefore will not be taking seriously by global leaders in a U.N. meeting scheduled for late this year in Mexico.
    Author Naomi Klein told Reuters that the most important thing that will come out of the meeting is the “revitalization of the environmental movement, of the climate justice movement.”
    “The way climate change is discussed in the north is as if it’s something that is going to maybe happen in the future, it’s just hypothetical, all about grandchildren, not about the children that are living today. So it’s important… for people in the north to hear directly from countries like Bolivia that are living climate change now,” she said.

(Pictures: top - Ecuadorian indigenous men attend the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth.  Centre right: Bolivia’s President Evo Morales speaks during the conference. Both pictures David Mercado/Reuters)

Biofuels were once seen as the perfect way to make transport carbon-free, but a series of EU studies are throwing increasing doubt on the green credentials of the alternative fuel.

The latest to be released gave a preliminary assessment that biodiesel from soybeans could create four times more climate-warming emissions than conventional diesel.

The European Commission has not helped itself by keeping many of the studies hidden — the most recent being an annex cut from a published report that was only released after Reuters and several NGOs used transparency laws to gain access.

Two other studies and leaked emails have added to the dossier of worrying evidence.

At the heart of the debate is an issue drily referred to as “indirect land use change”. In short, that means that biofuels use land and soak up grain supplies, sending reverberations through world commodity markets.

So a target for biofuels set in Brussels can indirectly force up food prices on the other side of the world, making the poorest go hungry and encouraging farmers to hack into tropical forests to gain new land.

Burning forests can release huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, reversing the emissions reductions the biofuels were meant to achieve in the first place.

So, what happens next? Will the European Commission propose restrictions on land-using biofuels when it issues a report on the issue later this year? Or does the fact that it has been burying these studies suggest it is trying to gloss over the problem?

Greenhouse gas emissions by industrialized nations fell by 2.2 percent in 2008, the steepest fall since 1992 as the world economy slowed, a Reuters compilation shows.

Following are official national greenhouse gas emissions data submitted to the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat in recent days.

A few are not yet available. (Thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent unless stated, excludes land use, land use change and forestry):

by Kwok W. Wan

As I travelled up to Cumbria to visit E.ON’s offshore Robin Rigg wind farm in northwest England, I passed through the Lake District, a place famed for its natural beauty.  Out of the train window, I saw grassy banks, craggy hills, farm fields rolling into moody skies — and lines of giant electricity pylons.

I wondered if the 125 metre tall wind turbines I was about to see would be as much of a scar on the coastline as these unnaturally straight man-made structures on the English countryside.  Would they also poke out like huge metal thumbs across the Irish Sea and distract us from the wild beauty of the surrounding lowland hills?

Having never seen an offshore wind farm before, I was aware of the controversy over noise pollution and turbines onshore blighting the landscape.  I was also told to look out for towers casting long shadows, and warned the sun shining through the blades could cause a strobe effect which might set off epileptic fits.

The helicopter took off from Carlisle airport towards the 180 megawatt Robin Rigg site and its 60 wind turbines.   The 14 mile (22.5 kilometre) trip to the site in the Solway firth would take around 15 minutes.  Around two-thirds of the way into our journey the pilot pointed out of the cockpit window.  “Look, there it is.”

I peered.  Still flying over land, I could see a black smudge on the horizon between a silver sea and light grey sky.  We were soon over water, and Robin Rigg was still undefined and shadowy, like oil stains on the cockpit glass.  But then a few minutes later, it appeared, and I saw them quite clearly and quite suddenly.

The white turbines and towers were thinner and more spindly than I expected.  Although I had seen pictures, I still imagined the blades would be like fat propellers.  But they were actually more like curved, slender helicopter rotor blades.  And the towers were delicately slim, and lined up like a grid of tall white toothpicks.

Blades spinning in perfect rows, across a flat stretch of water, Robin Rigg wind farm looked more like an art installation, a demonstration of engineering prowess, and E.ON couldn’t have chosen a more scenic place to have shiny new wind turbines than against a backdrop of miniature mountains and brooding clouds.

But the grand surroundings also dwarfed the wind farm and it was not until a ship approached a tower did I realise how massive they were, with the vessel not even reaching the top of the yellow band around the bottom of each tower, dwarfing the people onboard.

Before heading back, we swooped down to nearly sea level.  Staring down the corridor of towers, Robin Rigg filled your vision with a lattice of poles and spinning fins, a precise matrix of machines in the middle of half English, half Scottish wilderness.

On the train back I passed an old farmhouse in the Lake District, and it got me thinking of rural buildings, including windmills and water wheels.  This in turn made me think of the great artists and writers that have been compelled to include man-made structures and integrate them into what we would now call a classic countryside scene.

Nearly invisible from land, the noise, the flashing lights, and long shadow claims seemed barely credible for an offshore wind farm.  But would offshore wind farms be accepted into the landscape like windmills?  Or remain a coastal version of electricity pylons?

Like the old Spanish knight Don Quixote fighting fantasy giants, some worries over offshore wind have turned out to be imaginary, but it’s the sheer scale of wind power targets that could transform the view of coastal regions.

With Britain pushing to install 32 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2020 – equating to around 177 Robin Rigg sized farms or 10,000 turbines at current technology – let’s hope the imaginary giants stay orderly and remain out of sight from our beaches.

NOTE: Noise is from the helicopter.

Yalmaz Siddiqui is Office Depot’s director of environmental strategy. The views expressed here are his own.

The 40th anniversary of Earth Day on April 22 undoubtedly has many individuals and businesses ramping up their green efforts, programs and even launching new green products or processes.

At Office Depot, we’re doing the same, as our recent series of announcements has shown.

But the symbolism of the date has also encouraged us to think more broadly about the greening of business.

This has led us to three key insights that help us — and may help others — address the common challenges of going greener.

These insights can be seen as shifts in perspective that can help you turn “green” into opportunities for your organization.

Shift #1: Green means savings

Perhaps the single biggest challenge to companies going green is the notion that green equals cost. This is so central to our current thinking about green that when market researchers ask about willingness to go green, an accepted question is “how much more are you willing to pay for a green product?”

There are two problems with this thinking:

1. It reinforces the notion that going green necessarily costs more.

2. It ignores the fact that even if green does sometimes cost more, many green ideas can bring substantial savings over time.

For individuals trying to help their organizations go greener, perhaps a good way to overcome this challenge is to articulate potential green efforts by using the idea of a “Green Savings Continuum.”

This would allow you to first push for green initiatives that immediately save money, such as switching to remanufactured ink and toner cartridges, implementing a program to encourage staff to turn off lights and computers, and finding other ways to reduce waste and increase efficiency.

The savings for these efforts can then be used to invest in green efforts that may cost more upfront, but overtime will result in savings.

Examples here could be switching to energy efficient lighting and technology; and purchasing or switching to more durable or reusable products.

Savings from these efforts can then be applied to the other green efforts that do happen to cost more.

Shift #2: Shift from “what” you want to do to make your business greener to “who” you should engage.

Organizations can only go greener if individuals within their walls decide to go greener.

As such, perhaps a better way to encourage a systemic shift in your organization is to think less about what you’d like to do, and more about who controls the decisions that result in your organization’s environmental impact. Your first task is then to engage those specific individuals.

The key is to focus on understanding the challenges and goals of the people with decision making authority.

If you can align your green efforts with their objectives, you may be surprised how quickly barriers may fall.

In fact, what may surprise you is that there are green champions everywhere. People genuinely want to find ways to contribute to a “bigger cause,” and you may find people in the “green closet” everywhere in your company.

Spend time talking to the green champions you find. Help them think through the opportunities and support their efforts to implement new programs that deliver both economic benefits and positive environmental outcomes.

Start by finding individuals who can help reduce waste, improve efficiency and help grow your business by tapping into green customer segments.

At Office Depot, I have personally found green champions in a number of business units, including construction, supply chain, IT and facilities.

As a result, building a Gold LEED Certified store in Austin, Texas or transitioning to more fuel-efficient delivery trucks wasn’t as difficult as one may assume.

Shift #3: Shift from what is not being done, to what your company, and others are doing.

Another common challenge to the greening of business stems from the environmental community’s enduring focus on what is not being done to go greener. This focus disallows a celebration of what a person or a company is doing, because so much energy is spent trying to address things that are not being done.

By shifting your focus from the negative to the positive, you can create a virtuous cycle of greener actions.

Reward small steps everywhere you see them. Reward green champions by celebrating their actions through press releases or internal recognition.

The best approach might even be to completely direct your communications to the positive. This will help you avoid the common environmental refrain of “it’s great that you are doing this…but you could be doing so much more.”

Another valuable tool to green your company is to “normalize” green efforts. This means celebrating the green programs of other businesses, inside and outside your sector. By communicating the fact that other companies are going green, and “normalizing” the green-ward shift, you can help engage decision makers who may be more influenced by their peers than by you.

If you use this approach, be wary of stepping over the line by making negative comparisons. i.e. don’t communicate a competitors green effort by saying “we should be doing this because our competitor is doing it.”

Instead, simply communicate and celebrate that company’s greener practices. This soft sell of “normalization” is more powerful than the hard sell of comparison.

So the biggest challenges to greening a business are the same challenges as driving any other change.

You need to understand and address common perceptual barriers to change. You need to find and engage people who are best placed to drive the change. And you need to “normalize” and reward a shift from the status quo.

By applying these principles, you may help your company break through the common barriers to going green. And you’ll help ensure that by Earth Day 2050 we can celebrate the fact that we solved our environmental challenges, and we did so profitably.

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Photo shows the Detroit skyline during Earth Hour across the river from Windsor, Ontario March 29, 2008. REUTERS/ Mike Cassese

- Joris Melkert, MSc BBA, is assistant professor in aerospace engineering at the Delft University of Technology. The opinions expressed are his own.-

Despite the announcement that air space could begin to re-open in Northern Europe, the Icelandic volcano eruption could prove to be a major turning point for the global airline industry with short- to medium-term questions already being asked by some about its future financial viability.

One of the biggest questions, which engineers will be grappling with right now, is whether there is a cost-efficient way to ‘design out’ the current problems that aircraft experience with dust clouds.

The short answer is that it may be possible to make modifications to aircraft engine cores to make them less sensitive to ash deposits.  However, such major engine development is a long term project so no solution will be in sight for at least a year.  Moreover, the expense of such an undertaking could be prohibitively costly for airlines right now.

The volcano eruption has cost the airline industry an estimated 200 million dollars each day.  Voicing the industry’s frustration and concern, the Air Transport in Europe (AEA) trade body warns that, without state aid, some airlines would have potentially gone out of business as soon as next week unless travel restrictions began to be lifted.

The crisis has been especially worrying for the industry for three main reasons.

•    First, because the economic downturn of the last two years has already left many airlines in a very financially precarious position with cash flow a major concern.

•    Second, because Eyjafjallajökull, the Icelandic volcano which has erupted, could potentially sputter on (perhaps intermittently) for months or even more than a year.

•    Third, because the recent transport chaos could be followed in swift succession by an eruption at Eyjafjallajökull’s much bigger volcanic neighbour, Katla, as happened the last time Eyjafjallajökull erupted in 1821 - 1823 and 1612.  If Katla were to erupt in a significant way, the potential for travel chaos and economic damage would much greater than has occurred so far.

The massive financial hit being taken by the airline industry has perhaps inevitably brought it into conflict with regulators.

The IATA, the body that represents the world’s airlines, has been particularly critical about the decision to ground airlines on the basis on what it purports is “a theoretical model which does not work… instead of using a system and taking decisions on facts and on risk assessment”.

The industry also points to the numerous airlines which have launched test flights and found that the ash in the atmosphere had neither caused damage to the aircraft nor threatened the safe conduct of travel.

However, long-term damage to aircraft engines may not be witnessed after just a handful of test flights.  Moreover, the first duty of regulators must always be to put passenger safety first, and legitimate concerns do exist about flying in parts of Europe in current conditions.

When one knows where the dust clouds are, it is possible to avoid them by flying over or under them.  However, the problem with flying over is that it runs the risk of having to pass through them first.

The problem with flying underneath the clouds is that planes have to fly in air with a higher density with greater drag.  For every 5 kilometre drop in height, density doubles.  Thus, when aircraft move down from a cruise altitude of 10 kilometres to 5 kilometres drag and thus fuel consumption will double.  This is a serious obstacle for long-haul flights in particular.

In the short term, the best way forward will probably be for air space to be re-opened progressively based on the results of test flights with continuous monitoring of potential long-term damage to aircraft engines.

Once this current crisis is over, the key short to medium-term question for the airline industry will therefore be whether there is a cost-efficient way to ‘design out’ the current problems that engines experience with dust clouds.

This might become especially necessary if, as predicted, volcanic eruptions in Iceland and indeed elsewhere in the world become more frequent in coming years whilst world wide air traffic continues to grow.  At the end of the last ice age, for instance, the rate of eruption in Iceland was some 30 times higher than historic rates.

This is because the reduction in the ice load reduced the pressure in the mantle, leading to decompression melting there.  Since the late 19th century the ice caps in Iceland have been shrinking yet further, due to changing climate.  This will lead to additional magma generation, so we should not be surprised if more frequent and/or more voluminous eruptions start happening in the future.

Even if a technical solution isn’t possible to the aircraft engine core, it is unlikely that this will pose a mortal long-term threat to the industry.  With growing wealth, the global populace will want to travel more, despite concerns about global warming.  There will simply not be enough available capacity in surface transportation to meet this need.

While the short-term future of some airlines will therefore be a very rocky one indeed, growing global demand for long-haul travel in particular will ensure that the industry continues to exist and possibly prosper despite this week’s travel chaos.

Felix Salmon is a Reuters Blogger. This piece was produced by the Climate Desk collaboration.

About a decade ago, Miguel Torres planted 104 hectares of pinot noir grapes in the Spanish Pyrenees, 3,300 feet above sea level. It’s cold up there and not much good for grapes—at least not these days. But Torres, the head of one of Spain’s foremost wine families, knows that the climate is changing.

His company’s scientists reckon that the Rioja wine region could be nonviable within 40 to 70 years, as temperatures increase and Europe’s wine belt moves north by up to 25 miles per decade. Other winemakers are talking about growing grapes as far north as Scandinavia and southern England.

Torres’ Pyrenees vineyards are a hedge, and may not be necessary. But if climate change redraws the map of Europe’s wine world, he will be prepared. And his company will be one of a very few taking steps to adapt to the future effects of climate change.

How companies are preparing for these changes is a pressing topic, but when I agreed to write this piece I knew I was no expert. I set out to educate myself by posting open requests on my finance blog at Reuters, asking my eager-to-comment audience of business wonks to tell me stories of how big corporations are getting ready.

The idea was that my readers and other bloggers would cheerfully provide me with examples of how companies are preparing for the downsides—not to mention the opportunities—of climate change. I braced myself for the inevitable barrage of responses; what I got was a shocking lack of evidence that the corporate sector is doing much of anything.

Most companies seem to focus solely on mitigating changes to the climate: reducing carbon emissions, improving environmental sustainability, and striving to be enlightened stewards of the planet. Adaptation is the opposite, more-pessimistic approach: It is about ensuring survival in the exceedingly likely event that climate change continues.

The U.S. government is trying to create incentives for businesses and their investors to plan ahead. Newly issued Securities and Exchange Commission regulations mandate that any material risk connected to climate change has to be revealed, in an attempt to bring these issues out into the open and to allow investors to compare the ways that companies see climate risks and adapt their strategies accordingly. (Join a live Grist forum on the new SEC regulations.)

There are, to be sure, a few examples of corporations that are treating climate change as an ominous reality, or even as an opportunity. The biggest funders of Brazilian agricultural projects, state-owned banks BNDES and Banco do Brasil, are looking carefully at whether it makes sense to support projects which might not be viable in 20 or 30 years’ time. Agribusiness giants like Cargill and Monsanto are developing hardier crops, global shipping firms are planning for an ice-free Arctic passage, and power company TransAlta has scrapped potential new plants in the American West because it couldn’t ensure that water rights would be available for the next 40 years.

But those are at the margins. In the mainstream business world, climate change adaptation strategies are scant. The reasons for inaction are sometimes simple, but also counterintuitively complex.

Start with the superficial: Adaptation strategies have essentially zero PR value. They have nothing to do with saving the planet. Instead, they’re all about trying to thrive if and when the planet starts to fall apart. That’s not something any savvy company wants to trumpet to the world.

Then there is the mismatch of time horizons. Climate change takes place over decades, and corporate timescales generally max out in the five-to-seven-year range. Businesses typically won’t spend significant money planning beyond that period, especially because the effects on business models and future profitability are so difficult to predict.

It’s easy to talk about how hotel companies with coastal property might have to face more hurricanes, or rising sea levels. But it’s quite hard to know what is going to happen to any given beachfront resort with a sufficiently high degree of certainty. Given the enormous amount of variability in any complex model, if a company spent a lot of money carefully mitigating the risk of X, it could end up getting blindsided by Y instead.

“There are very difficult models to develop, with more rain here, less rain there,” says Andy Hoffman, associate director of the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan.

Finally, even if the effects of climate change are foreseeable, they can be impossible to hedge.

Say you’re an electronics manufacturer who is pretty sure that climate change is going to wallop Bolivia, resulting in political unrest and a spike in the price of lithium. All your devices run on lithium batteries, so this is a serious risk, but it’s far from obvious what you can do about it. It’s silly to start stockpiling lithium, and you can’t even bet on rising lithium prices 10 years from now, since it’s not a metal that is heavily traded in the futures markets. Essentially all that you can do is be very clear about the risk in your SEC filings, and go about your business as normal. And identifying a risk is not the same thing as being able to negate it.

A classic hedging strategy is to buy insurance. Reinsurance companies have expensive and sophisticated climate-change models. Pricing such risk is what they do. In many cases, they will make more money as the effects of climate change become increasingly visible and expensive, since they’ll simply raise premiums on everybody while refusing to insure the most vulnerable at any price.

But insurance doesn’t work very well as an adaptation strategy. Policies only last for one year, or at most two. The insurance companies don’t need to charge higher rates now if they see big and nasty things happening to the global climate in 20 years’ time—they can continue more or less as they are for the time being. It’s easy to forget that if you’re simply renewing an insurance policy every year: The existence of the insurance market gives companies a sense of false security that their risks are hedged.

To put it another way, insurance is a highly imperfect hedge for climate change, because it can go away or rise in cost very suddenly. After the Bhopal disaster in 1984, pollution liability insurance first disappeared entirely, and then, when it came back, cost 10 times as much. The risk of rising insurance costs—or insurance becoming impossible to buy at any price—is something so inherently difficult to protect against, most companies don’t even bother trying.

The behavioral economist Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, likes to say that climate change is a problem that is perfectly designed to make people do nothing: It happens far in the future; its effects will be felt most greatly by other people; and the efforts of any one individual are minuscule.

Companies, too, tend to behave in predictably irrational ways. Executives should try to imagine their companies 30 years down the line, struggling with the deleterious effects of climate change on profitability and corporate survival. But they don’t. That’s a job for the next CEO’s successor’s successor. Right now there are a million other things that seem much more urgent, starting with this quarter’s earnings.

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A man dressed as a city gentleman walks across a tightrope in London’s financial district November 12, 2008.      REUTERS/Stephen Hird

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired.  This piece was produced by the Climate Desk collaboration.

Last year, Beluga Shipping discovered that there’s money in global warming.

Beluga is a German firm that specializes in “super heavy lift” transport. Its vessels are equipped with massive cranes, allowing it to load and unload massive objects, like multi-ton propeller blades for wind turbines. It is an enormously expensive business, but last summer, Beluga executives hit upon an interesting way to save money: Shipping freight over a melting Arctic.

Beluga had received contracts to send materials on a sprawling trip that would begin in Ulsan, South Korea, head north and west to the Russian port city of Archangelsk—located near the border with Finland—and wind up in Nigeria.

Normally, this route requires Beluga’s ships to navigate an 11,000-mile route through the Suez Canal. But in 2008, its executives decided that global warming had eroded the Arctic’s summer sea ice significantly enough that their ships could travel the Northeast Passage along the north coast of Russia.

Previously, a cargo ship could only safely navigate that route if an icebreaker went ahead, smashing a route through thick ice.

Now, a warming climate had—for six to eight weeks beginning in July—transformed much of the route into mostly open water, studded with ice floes that the Beluga ships could navigate.

So the executives got permission from the Russian government to travel along the coast, paid a transit fee of “a comparably moderate five-digit figure,” and sent the ships on their way. Four moniths later, they’d finished the trip. Compared to the old Suez Canal journey, this shorter route saved an enormous pile of money: It cost $300,000 less per ship in lower fuel and bunker costs. Global warming had boosted the company’s revenues by more than half a million dollars in one year alone.

When I interviewed Beluga CEO Niels Stolberg via email this spring, he said he envisions using the Northeast Passage regularly.Indeed, he’s planning on another trip this summer.

He said that since the shorter passage requires generating far less C02, it’s “greener”; it’s also more ironic, since it was high concentrations of C02 that helped melt the route in the first place.

“I am convinced,” Stolberg added, “that the Arctic will become an area of quite regular sea traffic at least during summer.”

If you looked merely at the realm of politics, it would be easy to believe that the question “Is climate change really happening?” is still unresolved. In recent months, skeptics have attacked climate science with renewed vigor. Doubters seized on “Climategate “—leaked emails from bickering atmospheric scientists—to argue that the evidence in favor of warming is being cooked.

Other skeptics unearthed shoddy parts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s main report, such as the fact that it cited non-peer-reviewed work by an activist group when it predicted that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035.

And all along, conservative politicians have hissingly denounced global warming as a shady liberal scheme: Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma famously called it “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

These attacks appear to be working. A spring Gallup study found that Americans’ concern over global warming peaked two years ago, and has steadily declined since.

But there’s one area where doubt hasn’t grown—and where, indeed, people are more and more certain that climate change is not only real, but imminent: The world of industry and commerce.

Companies, of course, exist to make money. That’s often what makes them seem so rapacious. But their primal greed also plants them inevitably in the “reality-based community.”

If a firm’s bottom line is going to be affected by a changing climate—say, when its supply chains dry up because of drought, or its real estate gets swamped by sea-level rise—then it doesn’t particularly matter whether or not the executives want to believe in climate change.

Railing at scientists for massaging tree-ring statistics won’t stop the globe from warming if the globe is actually, you know, warming.

The same applies in reverse, as the folks at Beluga Shipping adroitly realized: If there are serious bucks to be made from the changing climate, then the free market is almost certainly going to jump at it.

This makes capitalism a curiously bracing mechanism for cutting through ideological haze and manufactured doubt.

Politicians or pundits can distort or cherry-pick climate science any way they want to try and gain temporary influence with the public.

But any serious industrialist who’s facing “climate exposure”—as it’s now called by money managers—cannot afford to engage in that sort of self-delusion. Spend a couple of hours wandering through the websites of various industrial associations—aluminum manufacturers, real-estate agents, wineries, agribusinesses, take your pick—and you’ll find straightforward statements about the grim reality of climate change that wouldn’t seem out of place coming from Greenpeace.

Last year Wall Street analysts issued 214 reports assessing the potential risks and opportunities that will come out of a warming world. One by McKinsey & Company argued that climate change will shake up industries with the same force that mobile phones reshaped communications.

Consider, as one colorful example, the skiing industry. Beginning 10 years ago, the Aspen Skiing Company began noticing that European ski lodges were being slowly destroyed by warmer weather.

Europe’s ski resorts tend to be located on lower mountains—about 6,000-8,000 feet high, compared to American peaks up around 11,000 feet—so they’re vulnerable to even extremely tiny increases in global temperature.

The 2 percent temperature rise in the 20th century was enough “to put a lot of them out of business,” says Auden Schendler, executive director of sustainability for Aspen Skiing, which operates two resorts spread across four mountains.

But now Aspen’s own season is getting shorter: “More balmy Novembers, more rainy Marches,” Schendler says. “That’s what we’re seeing, and that’s what the science suggests would happen. If you graph frost-free days, there are more and more in the last 30 years.”

Climate-change models also predict warmer nights. Aspen Skiing has noticed that happening too, and the problem here is that nighttime is when ski lodges use their water-spraying technology to make snow—”and if you make it when it’s warmer it’s exponentially more expensive.”

The increasing volatility of weather overall—another prediction of climate change—poses a particular danger for ski resorts, because they operate in the red most of the year, making up their deficit during the busy spring break in March. So if the weather is terrific for the entire winter but suddenly balmy during March break, that can ruin the whole fiscal year.

Schendler has also learned firsthand a point that climate scientists have been making for some time: With climate change, “warming” isn’t the only—or even the most serious—challenge.

The sheer interdependence of complex ecosystems systems can grease you. For example, recent droughts in Utah have kicked up red dust clouds that settle on Aspen’s snow. This makes the snow melt more quickly (because the red absorbs more heat from the sun) while also making it too gritty to ski on.

Are all of Aspen Skiing’s recent weather problems caused by global warming? It’s impossible to tell. But as Schendler notes, the last few years certainly mimic the precise effects that climate models predict, so it is at least a taste of what’s to come.

During a recent dust storm on Aspen’s slopes, Schendler’s boss wandered into his office looking morose. “He said, ‘Auden, if climate change is the scary thing for the future, this is the apocalypse now. What if you get this in March?”’ Schendler recalls.

Now, all this tricky weather hasn’t exactly destroyed Aspen Skiing; the firm could probably survive even worse stuff. The top of the mountain is so high “we can ski it in 50 years and it’ll be great,” Schendler notes. But it could certainly erode Aspen’s profits, and Colorado would suffer: The ski industry overall is a $2 billion business for the state, employing fully 8 percent of the workforce.

So to try and preserve its profit margins, the Aspen Skiing Company has recently become a loud voice in favor of congressional action on the climate. In 2007, Schendler testified before the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, calling for a cap on carbon emissions—among other things.

“Our attitude when we go to Congress is, look, we’re a business!” he adds. “We didn’t ask for this. We just started looking at the data and the science dispassionately and said, ‘Look, we’ve got a problem.’”

Another industry that can’t pretend climate change is a myth is insurance. Insurance firms have always carefully studied real-world data to figure out what, precisely, constitutes a risky activity. As a result, they were among the first to notice that weather was getting more violent, and more unpredictably so.

“It’s just a logical consequence,” says Peter Hoppe, head of the “Geo Risks Research” division of Munich Re, the multinational reinsurance firm. “Global warming affects our core business. We have seen changes already in some readings.”

Worldwide, Munich Re has found that “great catastrophes”—act-of-god weather events that cause more than a billion dollars of damage—have tripled since 1950.

In 2008, even though there weren’t any Katrina-level disasters, weather-related events were so severe that “catastrophic losses” to the world’s economy were the third-highest in recorded history, topping $200 billion globally—including $40 billion in the United States.

Hoppe doesn’t think global warming is all to blame; some of these events are likely due to natural cycles like the 30-year “North Atlantic Oscillation” that is currently warming the Atlantic. But Munich Re’s policy is that anthropogenic global warming is already making things worse, and that governments ought to act quickly while they still can.

Granted, a warming globe isn’t all downside for insurance firms. There are also profitable new business opportunities, as Hoppe points out.

Munich Re is now offering coverage for renewable energy products, because wind farms and solar parks need insurance against the possibility that low wind and weak sunlight will reduce their output.

“It’s very important for investors to dampen and level out the volatility from season to season,” Hoppe says. Munich Re has also developed a product covering solar cells that wear out before their expected 30-year lifetime.

Buying insurance against bad weather isn’t entirely new. Farmers have done it for years. But back in the late ’90s, before Enron imploded, it created a huge new market of selling “weather futures” to electric utilities—hedges that would pay out if, say, a mild summer hurt their sales (because people would use less air conditioning).

After Enron pancaked, weather futures stayed around—still mostly for utilities and farms—but buying them wasn’t easy: You had to personally contact one of the few weather-futures traders who’d set up their own trading desks in the wake of Enron’s dissolution.

But with climate-change models predicting increasingly erratic weather, a new generations of startups is heading into the field, figuring that almost any firm might want to hedge against the bad economic effects of weather—such as clothing manufacturers (who could suffer massive losses in coat sales if an unexpectedly mild winter emerges), airlines (since weather is the top cause of delays), and sporting-event promoters (when it’s rainy, everyone stays away).

Weatherbill is one such startup. Founded three and a half years ago by Google expatriates, it lets anyone use its website to quickly create weather insurance for almost anything.

Type in the thing you’re trying to insure—say, an Iowa county fair in the third week of July—and the Weatherbill system calculates the probability of what local weather will be like up to two years out, and down to a 100-mile-wide area. It then uses that guess to instantly price a weather future or insurance contract.

CEO Dave Friedberg told me Weatherbill had already sold contracts to the likes of the U.S. Open, and that he envisions worldwide opportunities: Global agriculture suffers billions in weather-related losses each year, for example, yet many countries don’t have any institutions offering easy weather insurance. That’s especially true for countries likely to be the first to experience the dire consequences of climate change, such as coastal regions of Asia or Latin America.

“If you think about Brazil, their two biggest industries are mining and agriculture,” Friedberg says.

“That’s billions of dollars, and there’s a massive market for developing crop insurance. If we can figure out agriculture, and do it right, the opportunity is huge to go country by country.” Does he believe that global warming is already noticeable? “Oh yeah,” he says. In just the three years that Weatherbill has been collecting data, extreme weather events have risen 8 percent.

One of the big political questions of climate change is how far we’ve gone: Have we passed a tipping point of no return? Has the atmosphere already accumulated such high levels of greenhouse gases that even if we manage to cut back on emissions, we’ll still wind up with a globe so much hotter that everyday life will change significantly? One emerging sector built on the assumption that we have is the “adaptation marketplace”—firms offering new products and services to help companies and cities cope with changes.

A 2009 study by Oxfam identified seven potentially lucrative adaptation areas, such as water management and disaster preparation; one firm in this field—the Minneapolis-based Pentair Inc., which makes pumps and filtration systems—has soared to $3.35 billion in annual revenues, partly due to contracts from the Army Corps of Engineers to provide massive pumps that will protect New Orleans against another Katrina.

Another firm, North Carolina’s WeatherPredict, has developed a technique to retrofit roofs with aerodynamic edges, reducing the damage they sustain in hurricane winds.

Firms that produce genetically engineered crops are also predicting they’ll reap profits from climate change: Monsanto, Bayer, BASF, and their sister firms have registered 55 worldwide patents for “climate ready” seeds designed to thrive in conditions of drought or other stress, according to a 2008 report by ETC Group, an environmental advocacy organization.

Will all this climate-propelled economic activity be good for the planet? Sure, it can be satisfying to see some major CEOs agree that climate change is a real and present danger. But many environmentalists predict that the flurry of new economic activity will create its own new problems.

The melting Arctic, in particular, gives many observers the willies. It’s likely to see an explosion in seabed oil-and-gas exploration and tourism. (Cargo shipping, interestingly, is likely to increase at a slower rate, partly because cargo ships ferrying “just in time” products can’t abide the delays that even small ice floes would cause—and nobody thinks the Arctic will be entirely ice-free for 100 years or more.)

Arctic experts—and the Navy—predict a catastrophe the first time a tourist vessel or oil tanker hits an iceberg and cracks up. “Tourist vessels aren’t ice-hardened, and in the polar regions “there’s no search and rescue or salvage” standing by, says Lawson Brigham, a University of Alaska professor who chaired the Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment, a four-year study of how commercial activity will progress in the warming North. “The water’s near freezing. All you need is one good Titanic.”

Other realms of climate-change commerce aren’t much prettier when you look at them closely. In agriculture, the advent of climate-ready crops is clearly useful, maybe even crucial, for adaption. But it also concentrates ever more power in the hands of a small coterie of firms that own the patents to drought-resistant seeds, and the cost could cause serious hardship in the desperately poor countries of Asia or Africa where the seeds might be most needed.

It’s also true that the number of climate visionaries in industry is still quite small. Certainly, companies with skin in the game are preparing for a warmer world.

But as the McKinsey report found, they’re in the minority. The grand majority are deeply myopic, focused narrowly on goosing profits in the next quarter—who cares what’ll happen ten years from now? (Read Felix Salmon on what makes most businesses so shortsighted here.)

In a sense, that makes them a mildly agnostic force. When climate change finally does impinge on their business, they’ll probably take action to adapt to it. But it also means that if they can see a short-term profit from fighting against climate science and sowing doubt, they’ll do that, too.

This is precisely what’s still happening in the energy industry, where many firms that pay lip service to the reality of climate change also quietly funnel millions to lobbyists who fight ferociously to prevent Congress from passing laws that curtail C02 emissions.

“We all know big companies who are doing all this green stuff, and their lobbyists are trying to kill the carbon bill as quickly as they can,” says Mindy Lubber, president of Boston-based CERES, an association of environment-minded investors whose members have $10 trillion under management.

It may be that the corrective force comes not from inside corporations, but from investors. Many large investors, including the California State Teachers’ Retirement System—the nation’s second largest public-pension fund—have begun demanding that firms examine and disclose any potential risks from global warming.

Shareholder resolutions demanding action on climate change have nearly doubled in the last two years, rising from about 55 in 2007 to 99 in 2009, Lubber notes.

In February, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued guidelines requiring that publicly traded firms better disclose their climate-change risk, including potential “physical” risks. (Join a live Grist forum on the new SEC regulations.)

“Anyone that’s building out new manufacturing facilities without working out water shortages related to climate change is getting itself into trouble,” Lubber adds. “Or anyone that’s building on waterfront property.”

Another common request from shareholder resolutions is for companies to calculate the cost of their carbon footprint. Even if electric utilities and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are fighting against carbon-limiting legislation, investors seem to believe it is inevitable—indeed, they evidently think the government might cap carbon even in the next few years, which could dramatically increase the cost of electricity.

To make corporations true partners in tackling climate change, Lubber thinks investors need to push for basic changes in the way their companies function.

CEOs whose bonuses are based on bumping next-quarter results will make short-term decisions. Those who are paid based on reducing carbon usage will make long-term ones—investing in technology and processes that reduce greenhouse gases.

“If they’re compensated for producing 86 percent more widgets, they’ll do that. But if they use less fuel, they ought to be compensated for meeting their carbon-reduction goals.”

In the short run, though, there’s probably only one force that will get today’s blithe firms to snap to attention–and that’s legislation.

If Congress actually puts a price on carbon, it’ll hit the world of industry with tsunamic force.

At minimum, it would probably goose the price of electricity and make emissions-heavy industries instantly less profitable. (Indeed, this is one of the things the SEC and many investor groups are urging firms to do: calculate how badly they’ll be shellacked if new regulations make spewing carbon expensive.)

Not everyone will be a loser. The McKinsey study calculated that alternative-energy firms will do quite well (for obvious reasons), but so will less-predictable sectors like the construction industry, as people rush to retrofit buildings with extra insulation and energy-saving rebuilds. The farsighted firms—and the ones who work on the colder fringes of the world—can see the future clearly, because they’re living it. But with the stroke of a pen, Obama can bring it a lot closer.

Whether it’s a melting Arctic or a bold new law, the biggest forces shaping industry are, as it were, man-made.

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Photo shows an ice-free Northwest Passage in this handout satellite photo from NASA taken on September 15, 2007.  REUTERS/NASA/Terra Satellite/Handout

- Dr Andrew Hooper is an Assistant Professor at Delft University of Technology and is an expert on monitoring deformation of Icelandic volcanoes. The opinions expressed are his own. -

The unprecedented no-fly zone currently in force across much of Europe has already caused the greatest chaos to air travel since the Second World War.  Thousands of flights have been cancelled or postponed with millions of travel plans affected.

The economic consequence to our ‘just-in-time’ society is incalculable at this stage given the disruption to holidays, business plans and indeed the wider business supply chain.  However, the global cost of the disruption will surely ultimately result in a cost of billions, with the share price of several airlines in particular already taking a hit.

It is exceptionally hard to gauge how long the current grounding of flights will remain in force, although Eyjafjallajökull, the Icelandic volcano which has erupted, could potentially sputter on for months or even more than a year.  Much could depend upon weather patterns, especially wind direction, over the next few days.

The worst-case scenario in terms of precedent here is the 1783-1784 eruption at Laki (a very large eruption of 14km3 compared to the one in Mount St. Helens in 1980 of 1 km3) that had a huge impact on the northern hemisphere, reducing temperatures by up to 3 degrees.  This led to catastrophe far beyond the shores of Iceland (where 25 percent of population died), with thousands of recorded deaths in Britain due to poisoning and extreme cold, and record low rainfall in North Africa.

By contrast, the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in 1821-1823 (when only about 0.1km3 was erupted) had little impact beyond the shores of Iceland, where livestock were killed by flourine poisoning.  Like 1821-1823, this current eruption is likely to remain small in terms of volume, but in an age of mass aviation, a relatively small amount of erupted ash is having huge consequences.

One volcanic eruption in Alaska in 1989 necessitated the postponement and cancellation of flights in North America for days.  It is likely that the fallout from the volcanic eruption yesterday will be worse because European airspace is more congested than in North America for global airline traffic.

How much material will be erupted? Observations of surface deformation can throw light on this.  These come principally from two sources — the first being a handful of GPS receivers dotted around the volcano by the University of Iceland and the Iceland Met Office, and the second being imaging radar on board satellites.

Differencing of subsequent radar images can give surprisingly accurate maps of the movement of the ground.  I and others at Delft University of Technology have been developing algorithms to push the limits of the technique, to extract measurements from radar data in regions where it is more difficult, and with greater accuracy.

The usual pattern with Icelandic eruptions is for rising and stretching of the surface as magma moves up to shallow depths of a few kilometres, followed by contraction and sinking of the surface as magma exits the shallow magma chamber and erupts at the surface.

However, in this case, Delft University, working in collaboration with the University of Iceland, has detected magma moving upwards until the onset of the initial eruption on March 20th, but very little deformation since then.

This implies that the volume of erupted magma is balanced by new magma coming from deep within the crust, perhaps even the crust mantle boundary, and it is impossible to know how much magma may be stored at these depths.  Thus, it remains a very real possibility that the volcano will continue to erupt on-and-off for months to come, as occurred during the last eruptive period in 1821-1823.

Measurements of the surface deformation, together with detected earthquakes, have indicated magma rising to shallow depths since the beginning of this year.  Questions have been raised why an eruption was not predicted beyond the time scale of a couple of hours prior to initiation.

From analysis of radar data we know of two events at Eyjafjallajökull in 1994 and 1999, that started in a similar way with magma moving to shallow depths (5-6 kilometres).  However, in both cases the magma then spread out laterally and remained in the crust.

Apparently something differed this time in that stress conditions favoured continued migration of the magma upwards.  We have some way to go before we can answer what seems like a simple question, whether magma moving upwards to shallow depths is likely to erupt, or stall within the crust.

At the end of the last ice age, the rate of eruption in Iceland was some 30 times higher than historic rates.  This is because the reduction in the ice load reduced the pressure in the mantle, leading to decompression melting there.

Since the late 19th century the ice caps in Iceland have been shrinking yet further, due to changing climate.  This will lead to additional magma generation, so we should expect more frequent and/or more voluminous eruptions in the future.

Eyjafjallajökull is a relatively small volcano and unlikely to erupt the volumes of material that will have a significant impact on climate.  However, eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull in 1821-1823 and 1612 were followed in short shrift by eruptions of its much larger neighbour, Katla.

Katla thus has shown the potential for large eruptions in the past — the last catastrophic Icelandic eruption prior to Laki was from Katla in 934 when an even greater volume of lava was erupted.  If Katla were to erupt in a significant way, the potential for travel chaos and economic damage would thus be much greater than has occurred over the last several days.