February 14, 2012 Occasionally, when I tell people at a professional or social event that I am a climate change engineer, I get scorn – from climate change skeptics. Perhaps you’ve met such people, too, when you identify yourself as working in the environmental or sustainability area. I divide such people into 2 groups: those [...]

January 31, 2012 Though some US municipalities are beginning to address it, climate change adaptation or how an entity will cope with the likely incremental increases in temperatures and precipitation (both greater rainfall and droughts) is not discussed much in board meetings or other strategic sessions. The trends are real and no longer something that [...]

Changing one’s ways or implementing new initiatives is difficult. It’s inconvenient. This seems especially true in the U.S. in recent years. Thus, the reluctance to implement smarter, cleaner strategies. Businesses in other nations have demonstrated that clean approaches – in operations and also in business strategies – have been successful in meeting the challenges of [...]

November 8, 2011 This seems a bit of an oxymoron. After all, how much can banks contribute to environmental sustainability? Banks do not require a lot of water to operate or release toxic pollutants into the air. To my knowledge the printing of money does not have a large carbon footprint. While banks and all [...]

April 19, 2011 This blog has provided many reasons to go “green”, both for companies, as well as the nation and the world. Here is another that has not been mentioned yet: a serious attempt to go green will spur technical innovation, new inventions, and cut costs on others. We have seen this already with [...]

April 5, 2011 I recently attended a local ½ day workshop on sustainability. 4 speakers from 4 major companies each spoke about their companies’ efforts to reduce their carbon footprint, reduce waste generation, conserve water, etc. Smiley talk, of course; they want to put their companies in the best light. During Q&A, a person in [...]

May 23 2010 Special thanks to Dennis Shelly of Apex Companies (www.apexcos.com), leader in due diligence assessments for his contributions to this article. As I’ve written a number of times, climate change has moved in the last year from being a voluntary program for companies that’s good for the bottom line and the Earth to [...]

Environmental News for You – March 2010 Discussions about climate change policy focus on how we can reach the goal that a large majority of the world’s scientists believe is necessary: to reduce global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 70-80% from a 1990 baseline by 2050. One suggested system to achieve this is called “Cap [...]