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While the challenges presented by climate change are formidable, they also present opportunity. That was the message Andrew J. McKeon delivered to Baruch students last week. Invited to speak at the college by Sigma Alpha Delta, he said that "Businesses will have to be more like ecosystems," implying the key to success is in innovative new technology, closed loop recycling and renewable clean energy.
New areas of science like biomimicry, innovations in finance like carbon emissions cap and trade programs and businesses that incorporate sustainability can reduce the dependence on fossil fuels and gain a competitive advantage. The net result is increased efficiency, a boost to profit margins and revenue. The growth in these fields is just beginning.
McKeon, a member of Al Gore's Climate Project and a founder of the Climate Change Foundation described the carbon footprints all along the supply chain of products like industrial carpets and cashmere sweaters. He referred to Ray Anderson as a leader in industrial ecology. Interface, Anderson's carpet manufacturing company, is an intensive petro-chemical business. Producing one ton of carpet created 33 tons of waste that ended up either in landfills or the atmosphere. Anderson was struck by the misuse of resources and said, "One day they will put people like me in jail."
Anderson's privately held company was reconfigured to reduce waste and increase efficiency. He developed a new business practice of leasing products to customers. At the end of the carpets' life, Interface not only removes the carpet, but uses it as raw material in the manufacture of new carpeting. The end result was a streamlined business with a higher net income.
McKeon mentioned cashmere sweaters as an example of how business can impact the environment in a negative way. Cashmere sweaters, once sold only in high end retail stores, are now cheap and sold in WalMart and Costco. The proliferation of these sweaters masks the problem of overgrazing, topsoil erosion and the carbon footprint of shipping products around the globe. Cashmere comes from goats that live on the Alashan Plateau in China near the Mongolian border. Since cashmere is a premium product, farmers have increased their herds significantly. However, instead of increasing profits, the non-sustainable practice has turned the lush plateau into a dustbowl where winds carry topsoil as far away as the Atlantic Ocean. Farmers now have to import food to feed their livestock. Over-production has made sweaters cheaper and simultaneously increased the costs of maintaining the herd.
Overfarming and deforestation, just like increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere, all contribute to climate change. What happens to the plateaus in China, the virgin forests in Sumatra or the Amazon has global consequences.
McKeon delivered grim news about the state of the climate. If the use of fossil fuels and other natural resources continues along the present trajectory, our planet will experience higher temperatures causing extreme weather conditions, a rapid extinction of plant and animal species, melting of polar ice caps as well as land-based ice, which, in turn, cause sea levels to rise.
Presenting a series of charts and graphs of average temperatures and CO2 levels throughout history, familiar to anyone who has seen An Inconvenient Truth, McKeon made the compelling case that these forces are now underway. Even starker were photos of melting glaciers and a slushy Greenland.
McKeon dispelled notions that climate science was a new development, saying the foundations go all the way back to Jean Baptiste Fourier's heat diffusion theories in the early 1880s right up to Roger Revelle's 1957 discovery of the impact of CO2 on our climate.
Echoing Winston Churchill, Andrew J. McKeon said, "We are entering a period on consequences when it comes to climate change." McKeon said we have to shed arrogance as well as ignorance about our consumption of fossil fuels and natural resources. "One of the lessons of nature," he said, "is you don't foul your nest. If you do, you destroy yourself. Ecosystems can tell us incredible ways to sustain ourselves for generations."
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