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Wed Oct 8, 2008 2:38pm EDT
By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The current financial downturn could spur demand for sustainably designed buildings and communities, the chairman of one of the world’s largest green architecture firms said on Tuesday.
“It’s the environmental opportunity of a lifetime,” Bill Valentine of the HOK firm told the Reuters Global Environment Summit. “And if we don’t use it now as an opportunity to make the sustainable movement not just make progress, but gallop ahead, we’ve lost our chance.”
The turmoil in the world’s financial markets makes environmental construction easier to sell, Valentine said.
“The heart of sustainability is conserving and not wasting, and this idea of getting clients to think about projects that are actually less expensive rather than more expensive and still sustainable these days gets a lot of good traction,” he said.
With more than 2,600 employees and 26 regional offices in North America, Asia, Australia and Europe, HOK generated $151 million, or 23 percent of total revenue, from sustainable projects in 2007.
A decade ago, HOK’s staff often had to push environmentally friendly architecture, said Mary Ann Lazarus, the firm’s chief of sustainable design. These days, the economy and the price of fuel and transporting materials means there’s no need to push.
“In the last couple years, there has been new client interest in it,” Lazarus said. Developers want this kind of design for market reasons, and other clients are motivated by the need to attract valuable employees, she said.
In the health care sector, Lazarus said, clients want hospitals and clinics designed to uphold the Hippocratic oath — “First do no harm” — but also to keep staff turnover to a minimum, by offering congenial, healthy workplaces that also use less energy.
© Thomson Reuters 2008. All rights reserved.
The oil-rich Middle East has become a driver of innovation in sustainable design, Valentine and Lazarus said.
The firm is involved in two large Middle Eastern projects — the new King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia and an airport — where the demand for environmental construction is keen. HOK officials did not say where the airport was located.
“To my extreme surprise and great glee, they are extremely interested in sustainability,” Valentine said. “They want the world to see them as not wasting and … they realize that their oil has to run out some day.”
(For summit blog: summitnotebook.reuters.com/)
(Reporting by Deborah Zabarenko, editing by Brad Dorfman)
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/GlobalEnvironment08/idUSTRE49716K20081008
Wed Oct 8, 2008 3:41pm EDT
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
BARCELONA, Spain (Reuters) – Worsening damage to nature is jolting the world into doing more to protect animals and plants and new economic arguments will bolster the case for action, the head of a global conservation network said.
“We are really in trouble,” Julia Marton-Lefevre, head of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), told Reuters on Wednesday after an IUCN “Red List” this week showed that a quarter of all mammals were threatened with extinction.
“The amount of loss we have been able to measure … is really pretty frightening,” she said during an Oct 5-14 IUCN congress, held once every four years, during which 8,000 delegates are looking for better ways to safeguard the planet.
The IUCN groups governments, conservation organizations and scientists.
“People really get it that we have less water, that the water we have is not usable, that we have fewer places to breathe. People are noticing that the environment we have been taking for granted all of a sudden is not really there or there in a smaller way,” Marton-Lefevre said.
She said the Barcelona congress showed conservation was “no longer a sideshow.” The meeting is drawing government ministers, leaders of businesses such as oil group Shell and miner Rio Tinto, and indigenous peoples from the Amazon.
The mood was “there’s enough conviction now that there is a problem and we do have some solutions so let’s get on with it,” she said.
But economic arguments about the essential role of biodiversity — for uses such as food, pharmaceuticals or building materials — had not yet sunk in fully.
“Maybe the economic message hasn’t yet been made clear to people. Once they start counting, I think they’ll see it pretty clearly,” she said.
A report submitted to a U.N. biodiversity conference in May said mankind was causing 50 billion euros ($68 billion) of damage to the planet’s land areas every year, with factors including pollution and deforestation.
High food prices highlighted the effect of loss of biodiversity, it said. The cumulative loss could amount to at least 7 percent of annual consumption by 2050, it said.
That meant conservation was a huge long-term challenge even if financial turmoil was now overshadowing threats to nature.
Marton-Lefevre said conservation was increasingly trying to “join the dots. It’s not just the one species that you are in love with that the world is losing, but ‘what does this mean?’.
She said the IUCN could help to offer solutions. “We have the instruments to protect some parts of the environment, protected areas or better species protection.”
Some species have been brought back from the brink of extinction, for instance with captive breeding.
– For Reuters latest environment blogs click on: blogs.reuters.com/environment/
(Editing by Janet Lawrence)
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/GlobalEnvironment08/idUSTRE4979Q720081008
Tue Oct 7, 2008 9:55pm EDT
By Nichola Groom
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – It will be years before demand for hybrid cars in the United States and Europe is big enough for battery manufacturers to make money from that business, but electric cars are nevertheless poised to dominate the market for greener vehicles, the world’s largest car battery maker said on Tuesday.
Johnson Controls Inc’s hybrid battery business will be profitable “within five years,” according to its president, Alex Molinaroli. He added that demand for fuel-sipping hybrid cars, while strong, must get much bigger before the company’s investment in the technology will pay off.
“It’s very expensive to be in this,” Molinaroli said at the Reuters Global Environment Summit. “It’s the opportunity to spend money, not make money today.”
The premium consumers must pay for hybrid cars has prevented them from gaining a bigger share of the overall auto market, and Molinaroli said global financial turmoil would weaken demand for both traditional and hybrid vehicles.
“If you are a consumer and you are going to buy a vehicle — hybrid or non-hybrid — you are going to delay your purchase,” Molinaroli said.
Last year, Johnson Controls reported revenue of about $4.3 billion from batteries, though very little of that has come from the developing hybrid battery business. Johnson Controls’ Power Solutions unit’s plan for profitability assumes that hybrid electric cars will make up 6 percent of the U.S. and Western European auto markets by 2020.
Automakers from Detroit’s General Motors Corp to Japan’s Toyota Motor Corp are developing electric cars for the United States, where soaring pump prices have increased consumer demand for cleaner, gas-sipping vehicles such as Toyota’s popular Prius hybrid.
GOING ELECTRIC
They are also, however, pursuing other technologies that would reduce dependence on gasoline, including increased efficiency for traditional combustion engines, alternative fuels such as ethanol and hydrogen fuel cells.
According to Molinaroli, however, automakers already hard-hit by a weak global economy and declining auto sales will not be able to keep funding all of those technologies.
“The automobile manufacturers are not going to be able to afford to keep investing in all these different technologies,” he said. “You see the long-term R&D effort focused on the electric car. People talk about fuel cells, but I don’t really see the kind of energy and effort around that that I see around the electric power train.”
Through its joint venture with French battery maker Saft, Johnson Controls is supplying next-generation lithium-ion batteries to Daimler for its Mercedes S-class hybrid sedans due out next year and is also working with Ford Motor on a pilot fleet of plug-in sport utility vehicles.
About 90 percent of Power Solutions’ research and development spending is going toward lithium-ion batteries, Molinaroli said. Those are lighter, smaller and longer-lasting than the nickel-metal hydride batteries that power the current generation of hybrids, including the Prius.
Given the promise of lithium-ion batteries, many companies are investing heavily in that technology, and Molinaroli said he expects the industry to consolidate.
In particular, he said newer companies without other battery or automotive businesses to support the high cost of developing an emerging technology would likely be swallowed up by established players such as Johnson Controls.
“We don’t have an approach today that we are going to invent everything ourselves,” Molinaroli said. “We’re going to always be looking.”
Despite its focus on hybrid growth in the world’s biggest auto markets, Molinaroli said electric car growth could be faster in China, where electric vehicles akin to golf carts will replace transportation such as bicycles and scooters rather than SUVs.
“They can’t go everywhere on a bicycle, and they all can’t afford a $20,000 to $30,000 vehicle, but they have to move people around,” Molinaroli said. “The next step up from that is going to be some sort of vehicle, (but) it may not be a vehicle that would be acceptable in both Western Europe and the U.S.”
Speedy growth of electric cars in China would be an added benefit to the company’s business plan, Molinaroli said.
“Anything that we do in China — even though it’s in our business plan — would really be kind of upside to what our current plan is,” Molinaroli said.
Johnson Controls’ joint venture with French battery maker Saft already has supply deals with Chinese automakers SAIC Motor Corp and Chery Automobile Co.
Johnson Controls shares fell $1.15, or 4.4 percent, to close at $24.99 on the New York Stock Exchange.
(For summit blog: summitnotebook.reuters.com/)
(Additional reporting by Braden Reddall and Peter Henderson in San Francisco and Poornima Gupta and Soyoung Kim in Detroit; editing by Gerald E. McCormick, Phil Berlowitz)
© Thomson Reuters 2008. All rights reserved.
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/GlobalEnvironment08/idUSTRE4970DM20081008
Wed Oct 8, 2008 8:11am EDT
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
BARCELONA, Spain (Reuters) – Prince Albert of Monaco wants Grand Prix cars to run entirely on biofuels in a shift he says will help the sport’s image and limit greenhouse gas emissions from his Mediterranean principality.
He also told Reuters that royal families around the world were getting more involved in urging citizens to do more to combat climate change, partly because the scientific findings underpinning global warming had become so robust.
“Everyone can play a part; that’s the important message,” he said of the drive to slow global warming and avert feared heatwaves, floods, droughts and rising seas.
“Formula One will have to come to alternative energies in the near future,” he said on the sidelines of a International Union for Conservation of Nature conference in Barcelona.
“If they are going to have to maintain some level of credibility, then they will have to keep up with ongoing trends” toward cleaner energies, he said of Formula One racing. The cars can now burn close to a liter of fossil fuel per kilometer.
Asked if he wanted the engines to run completely on alternative fuels, he said: “that’s the aim, it will take some time but I’m sure we will get to that.”
He said people sometimes asked him when he urged more action on climate change: “how can you speak about these issues when you have a Formula One race in your back yard?” The Monaco Grand Prix winds through the 0.76 sq mile principality.
Formula One organizers should take on a “leadership role” to transform cars, he said. From 2008, at least 5.75 percent of all fuel used in Formula One must be from biological matter.
The sport’s governing body said in July that the sport was “becoming unsustainable” and asked teams to come up with new rules to slash costs and halve fuel consumption by 2015.
On Grand Prix days, Monaco felt it was doing its part by restricting car parking in a shift that means that 80 percent of spectators arrive by train. “So that’s worked quite well,” Prince Albert said.
ELECTRIC BIKES
The Prince, aged 50, said that Monaco was making steps to cut pollution — it has cut greenhouse gas emissions by eight percent since 1990 and has taken measures such as planting 340,000 trees to help protect the environment.
The Prince was named a “Champion of the Earth” by the U.N. Environment Programme this year. It said Monaco was “applying an exemplary policy on carbon dioxide reduction in every sphere of society.”
Among measures, Monaco was making electric-power bicycles available in parking garages. “Why electric bikes? Monaco…is very hilly. This is the appropriate method of transport for Monaco,” he said.
The principality, of 32,000 people, had also encouraged the use of car pooling, with 750 people using it every day. The principality’s workforce has risen by 2,000 in recent years.
Asked if millionaires living by the Riviera were affected by incentives such as wider use of bicycles, trains or Monaco’s tax breaks to install solar panels, he said:
“It’s all a question of making it sound economically attractive. If the incentive is there I don’t see why people should not move.”
He said that royal families had often focused in the past on humanitarian issues but were now also shifting to the environment and climate change.
“More and more they are also learning of environmental issues. Everybody in a position of leadership, different actors in society, every citizen has to get involved. Everyone can play a part.”
“Maybe they (Royal families) were holding back for different reasons. I think one mainly is that of insufficient or incomplete evidence.” But he said that the evidence was now “irrefutable.”
(Editing by Paul Casciato,
© Thomson Reuters 2008. All rights reserved.
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/GlobalEnvironment08/idUSTRE49747120081008
Wed Oct 8, 2008 10:20am EDT
By Anupreeta Das
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Venture capitalist and “cleantech” evangelist Vinod Khosla is placing his bets on alternative technologies that could potentially make at least 80 percent of global energy consumption cleaner in the next few years.
Speaking during the Reuters Global Environment Summit, Khosla said he hunts for “black swans” in alternative energy — revolutionary and unforeseen ideas that change the world as we know it — and are as unexpected as the birds they are named for.
“There is no such thing as great visionaries,” said Khosla, one of Silicon Valley’s best-known venture capitalists. “There’s a huge dose of luck… we just have to take more shots on goal.”
Khosla said Nassim Taleb, a Wall Street trader-turned-author uses the term “black swan” in a recent book to describe the unpredictable and consequential events in business that can be clearly explained once they happen — such as the current financial crisis.
But the world of technology creates opportunities for “good” black swans, added Khosla, who was dressed in his trademark all-black outfit.
Khosla Ventures, the venture capital firm he founded in 2004, has alternative energy investments across the spectrum of wind, solar, biofuels and geothermal energy.
The firm also invests in cleaner battery technology and cleaner building materials; Khosla said he expected more than half the firm’s investments in 65-odd start-up companies to succeed.
Khosla said clean technologies had to do much more than reduce the size of our average carbon footprint to compete with traditional sources of energy or building materials, such as fossil fuels or cement. They also had to be cheaper than traditional power and have the ability to scale up to mass production.
“Does a Prius sell well? Of course it does,” Khosla said, referring to Toyota Motor Corp’s hybrid vehicle. “So do Gucci bags. But are they material compared to the number of bags sold at Walmart? Not on your life.”
BETTING ON BIOFUELS
Biofuels made from non-food based natural sources and waste — cellulose such as wood chips and switchgrass — were among the most promising sources of scalable clean energy alternatives, Khosla said.
He said he expected there to be at least six different ways of producing cellulosic ethanol within the next four years, and each of these methods would produce the alternative fuel at prices competitive with corn-based ethanol and regular gasoline.
Once the wider market saw that a cleaner fuel could be made cheaply enough to compete with existing fuels, Khosla said he expected a mass conversion to the cheaper and cleaner fuel — particularly because cellulosic ethanol can be poured into gas tanks with only minor modifications to the car.
Khosla agreed the future of biofuels remained uncertain because the technologies were still new, but defended his optimistic outlook by saying that millions of investment dollars had been poured into alternative fuels since 2006, which is accelerating research, production and eventual commercialization.
“Four years ago, when I said biofuels were interesting, people told me don’t be flaky,” he said.
Even big oil is taking an interest in the activity going on in these second-generation biofuels, so-called because they come after the push toward corn-based ethanol.
Other than biofuels, technologies that store solar and wind power to provide a consistent supply — “not just when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining” — would get more venture investment dollars, he said.
An Indian-American who came to the United States as a student in the 1970s and is a fixture on Forbes Magazine’s list of billionaires, Khosla said he is happiest poking around for the next big cleantech idea and chatting with entrepreneurs.
“I’m a techie nerd,” said the co-founder of Sun Microsystems.
(For summit blog: summitnotebook.reuters.com/)
(Editing by David Fogarty)
© Thomson Reuters 2008. All rights reserved.
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/GlobalEnvironment08/idUSTRE49719S20081008
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