Fly on the Wall Street

Finance, energy, and the environment: markets and opportunities

Posted by Emily Gertz (Guest Contributor) at 4:11 PM on 25 Apr 2008

Read more about: Sierra Club | business | renewable energy | energy | politics

Last night, I went to a panel at the Museum of American Finance on Wall Street (no, really!) on what's financially hot or soon will be in non-coal, non-oil energy technologies. I love these kinds of events; typically, what comes of them is reality-based information, dealing with who has the money, where it's going (or ought to go), and what will get it there, in order to transform our energy system. I come away from these things more hopeful than from any number of political rallies, because these are people who are walking their talk instead of posing in their Rogan jeans and "Save the planet" t-shirts.

The panel was co-sponsored by Sierra Club, so the articulate Carl Pope was one of the speakers, natch. The other speakers were Pete Cartwright, CEO of Advanced Power Projects, Inc.; Daniel Abbasi, head of regulatory and public policy research for MissionPoint Capital Partners ("Financing transition to carbon free economy"); Michael Molnar, VP at Goldman Sachs, responsible for alt. energy and coal sectors in the Energy & Materials Equity Research Business Unit; and moderator Myron Kandel, founding financial editor at CNN.

You can read my liveblog-style notes for the whole evening at my own blog. A few juicy nuggets:

Abbasi: We see right now the challenge as a commercialization and diffusion problem, not an innovation problem ... Example: Sun Edison -- biz model innovation, not new tech. Wal-Mart is now a client -- let us borrow your roof, we'll put the solar power panels on them, maintain them, you'll have solar power and some price guarantees. Diffusion is the key at this point, not invention.

Pope: With a new president, we get a new opportunity but not a solution. League of Conservation Voters survey: counted all questions asked of all candidates this year by 14 Sunday talk show hosts and other pundits -- 3,500 odd questions in total. Five had to do with energy and global warming. 42 about haircuts.

No one's asked these candidates what they'll do. If we don't improve the quality of American citizenship, we will not improve quality of American leadership. But that said, the candidates are willing to talk about it, but the media won't ask.

Molnar: [on companies touting green credibility] Information is not in the graphic of green or green brand statement. Look at company's 10K to see how much money the company is making on green tech. Magnitude of problem: you need to see companies making money to stimulate investment. When there's an eco incentive and people can make money, that's the scenario where you can have positive change. A lot rests on government policies and subsidies.

Cartwright: Yes, incentives are important. But energy industry moves very slowly. If we invented the perfect clean tech today, it wouldn't make a significant contribution for 20 years. So I think we have to go with the tech we currently have available, and I think yes, a recession might hurt [our progress].

For story: Fly on the Wall Street
8 Comments | Post a Comment

Reasonable/unreasonable

Thanks for the notes on the discussion - v. interesting.

... these are people who are walking their talk instead of posing in their Rogan jeans and "Save the planet" t-shirts.

W-a-a-l-l, I dunno, Emily.

Putting solar and renewables on the agenda, that was the work of activists and visionaries 30-40 years ago. Even now, you've got to keep your eye on the investors and industrialists. They are quite good at playing the game they see in front of them - making money through alternative energy. They are terrible at things outside the system.

For example, 95% of the talk is about new sources of energy, whereas the cheapest, most effective and most environmentally strategy is efficiency and conservation. It's hard to make money in that sector, so it generally gets ignored.

The most effective way to solve the transportation problem is patterns of life that center our activities in an area that doesn't require long-dx transportation. Not immediately profitable, so it's dismissed. Instead, 90% of our attention is focussed on enabling Americans to keep driving.

If you want to see what is going to be profitable and "realistic" in the future, look at what the dreamers are doing now: the permaculturalists, the simple living people, the relocalization movement.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
- George Bernard Shaw

Bart
Energy Bulletin

by Bart Anderson at 8:30 PM on 25 Apr 2008

Werbach

"let us borrow your roof, we'll put the solar power panels on them, maintain them, you'll have solar power and some price guarantees. Diffusion is the key at this point, not invention."

No credibility without action. We told Adam, get Walmart to solarize their buildings and sell the mass produced panels, then and only then will anyone believe in a green/blue image campaign.

Diffusion takes mass markets and mass production, that will bring cost down. Companies that step up and take a risk now will reap huge rewards. This is bigger than the PC/internet boom.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

by amazingdrx at 10:32 PM on 25 Apr 2008

perspective

"because these are people who are walking their talk"

that's what many said about Enron when they were revolutionizing the energy trade......

not to rail on interdisciplinary, "nontraditional" stakeholder building, but i'd be real interested to see some of these folks' ecological footprints....

by greenfire8 at 2:47 AM on 27 Apr 2008

Unreasonable men

This is a tangent, and I apologise for it, but Bart, I'm fascinated by your George Bernard Shaw quote. I can't quite get round the meaning of it, but I think it might, just might be wonderfully subtle.

Are you suggesting that progress is being driven by unreasonable men, and therefore fails to adapt itself to the needs of the world's biosphere? That the problem is with Progress itself - as we understand it, as the Fabians understood it? That Progress, the innate stubborn selfishness ingrained within it, must be tamed by enlightened Reason if we are to learn to live in this world?

If so, it's brilliantly subversive: I tip my hat to you sir!

by Ark Kreitman at 1:43 AM on 28 Apr 2008
[ Parent ]

In praise of unreasonable men

Art, with respect I believe your suggested interpretation is about 100% wrong. GBS was no enthusiast of subtlety: his writings tend to the exceedingly direct. In Shaw's vocabulary progress was a positive thing containing no "innate stubborn selfishness" but rather representing humanity's striving toward the greatest fulfillment of its potential for good here on the earth. "Reasonableness" means accepting the status quo and failing to seek that fulfillment. Shaw here is praising the unreasonableness that seeks to better the human condition. Shaw's list of unreasonable men would have included such luminaries as Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr.

And Shaw himself of course would certainly have wished to be found in that "unreasonable" company. A lifelong vegetarian in an age at least as carnivorous as our own, a committed socialist long before socialism became a major political force in Britain, Shaw's life and work was devoted to challenging the status quo, not to "taming" the impulse to improve it.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

by spaceshaper at 4:58 AM on 28 Apr 2008

"progress"

(Possibly the progressive luminary Mohandas Gandhi, born in British South Africa, afterwards awarded the honorific religious title "Mahatma," would not have minded -- nor minds even now! -- that the aspiration proper to the D in his name gets so often oddly transferred to the G, even by such learned people as SpaSh. : ) )

Of course, "progress," meaning "stepping forward," does not necessarily tell us much about where we are going or what we are supposed to be doing. "Up" and "down," in the cosmos, after all, are not very meaningful terms, either.

Possibly Shaw, and we, could say this: We are now at Point N. We used to be at Point M, and partly by our calculation and design, and partly by the unfathomable turning of Fortune's Wheel, we have got to Point N. And now, carrying on in the same direction, we hope to reach Point O.

Actually, I at least would NOT want to say that, however logical it might seem. Nor am I convinced that Shaw would want to say that. We may very well suspect that the line from Point M to Point N, extended to the hypothetical Point O, is not a good one. But, in our memories, or in our history, or in our heart, we have a deep sense of a very good Point G, lying far deeper than Point M, and much forgotten, and not in the line M--N--O. And we suspect that a new line, to a wonderful future, Point W, G--N--W, is the line that we should be working on.

So, in sum, both M--N--O and G--N--W require "progress." But there is "progress," and then again there is "progress."

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

by caniscandida at 7:30 AM on 28 Apr 2008

agreed

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

by spaceshaper at 11:15 AM on 28 Apr 2008

ahhh....semantics

"Shaw's list of unreasonable men would have included such luminaries as Ghandi"

I love that interview w/ Ghandi where he was asked, "what do you think about Western Civilization?" His reply, "I think it would be a good idea."

by greenfire8 at 12:57 PM on 30 Apr 2008

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