December 15th

Hi Everyone,

After a restful and peaceful Monday that I took off to recover from a full-throttle weekend, I was ready to get an early start this morning early. I was up and about at 6:30 AM.

My first plan was to attend the IETA Side Event titled ‘Corporate Responsibility’ sharp at 8:30 AM. When I arrived, there were very few people present and appeared that the event had been cancelled. I sat along with a group of professional awaiting the event, and I met Ruth Dobson who works for PriceWaterHouseCoopers’s branch in Beijing, China. She recommended me to get in contact in with Gary Sharkey. He had worked in China for 8 years and was originally from the US. His position was the sustainability network driver. Again this is all by coincidence.

By 9:00 AM, the panel speakers had turned up and decided to do the panel discussion.
These are some of my highlights from the event:

The questions that were being addressed was why are corporations incorporating sustainability into their core corporate fabric and how is it that corporations are engaged in these issues.

One of the companies represented was Applied Materials, an infrastructure company. Some of the comments were that employed solutions have to be employed at scale. In addition, he spoke to the shift from risk management to opportunistic outlook. In other words, it was not risk avoidance rather to seize those market opportunities. For Applied Materials, they saw a huge opportunity in the energy market, specifically solar PV. It was seen as both profitable and strategically sound. The key was to have long-term view and to walk the talk beginning with operations. He noted that the employees also appreciate these initiatives because that it offered meaningful work that they wanted to work for.

Another speaker pointed out that environmental management focus currently tends to be on climate, and in perhaps another 10 - 15 years water will be the new focus. The key parts he addressed was a company has address the questions of the risks, opportunities, do they need to adapt, how does climate change effect the company presently and in the future to come. However, the sustainability is becoming a fundamental as core in business with an added benefit of attracting youth and university graduates.

During a Q&A, Bruce mentioned several interesting functions the company is doing to promote and enable a culture of sustainability. The company has a goal of a 20% reduction of their CO2 emissions by 2010 through consolidating their facilities, putting in solar PV and energy efficiency projects. On the culture side, the company has an office of sustainability. The have a steering council that is made up of champions of sustainability from different departments such as marketing, human resources, information technology, and so on as a mechanism to engage people from across the company. Another is from a grassroots level with a team called Green Teams. They concentrate on things that the employees can make the biggest impact such as paper usage. They had a way to monitor how much each employee was using and find the biggest consumers. In addition, they educate their employees by bringing in speakers. One very well recognized speaker was Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. The goal behind this is that the employee will take there knowledge and share it with family and friends. For food, they bring in local farmer's produce and have compostable stations. On last note was a very effective, yet simple tool to bring people into the discussion of being involved. It was called 'Do one thing and share it with the company.' This is self explanatory, but at the end you have a large (excel?) document of all the employees, which allows them to see other creative ideas that they can use themselves. The key point is that the green groups are trying to help transform the culture.

The other panel speaker I want to briefly reference. He said we need to have a 2050 perspective, and realize that human nature is wasteful. He brought up Duke Energy. I met with the vice president of Duke Energy at the reception last Sunday evening. He said if Duke Energy was a country, it would be ranked 41st based on its GHG emissions. Lastly, as we address coal-based US states, we need to keep in mind the economic viability aspect. If we take coal away, what are you going to put in replace. At the end of the day, the governors and senators will be voting with his wallet. Job creation is the primary focus for the US.