Innovations: A visit to Energyville

The year 2007 may be remembered as the time when everything green was hyperinflated and oversold — a time when every magazine in the world from Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone to Bitch did a green issue — and yet sobering commentary on the reality of green was most needed in the externality-optimizing, capitalistic, quasi-democracy that is the United States. What’s even more insidious is the increasing amount of sophisticated propaganda masquerading as “honest talk about green” being put out, in large part by the oil and auto industries.

Thankfully, the six CEOs who appeared on the panels at the Sustainable Industries Economic Forum events in Portland and Seattle early this fall provided both reason for optimism and a reality check to the more than 700 business leaders in attendance.

Columbia Forest Products CEO Harry Demorest shared the story of his company’s creation of the PureBond adhesive. Columbia is both the largest manufacturer of hardwood plywood and the largest employee-owned company in the United States. Working with a professor at Oregon State University who had analyzed the adhesive properties of a particular mussel from the Oregon coast, the company pioneered the creation of an adhesive for plywood that was free of formaldehyde.

“To make a current political analogy, we thought we would be greeted as liberators,” Demorest said, referring to the cabinet companies who are Columbia’s major customer base. Instead, the largest customer was so angry that Columbia’s product created a new question for end customers — What is formaldehyde, and is it in my cabinets? — that they stopped buying from Columbia. It takes real leadership to keep going in the face of a challenge like this, and thankfully the company continues to persevere.

Compare this determination with Chevron’s (NYSE: CVX) likely larger investment in a slick new online game at www.willyoujoinus.com, developed in partnership with The Economist Group (publisher of the Economist). This is a simulation of a city over the next 20-plus years where, after you name your city (I named mine EcoMetro), you then select the energy sources to power the city and then learn the environmental, economic and security impacts of your choices.

So, in the interest of serving you, the reader, I sacrificed an evening to playing Chevron’s energy game. There are two phases of development: one in 2015 and one in 2030. For 2015, I selected lots of wind and solar power, and then added a little biomass and natural gas. As I tried to add more renewables, the system flashed a message: “Warning! EcoMetro needs petroleum.” No matter what I did — including adding nuclear and coal power — I couldn’t avoid having to add petroleum to continue with the game.

So I succumbed and added petroleum. But before advancing me to 2030 where I could choose energy sources again, the game brought up several messages of things that occurred in the intervening years. They all had to do with catastrophes surrounding the use of renewable energy sources. “Wind power fails to deliver. Offshore wind farms fail to perform as anticipated,” was one message. Another was “Small industrial solar panels prove to be too costly.” Perhaps the most amusing was “Storms ravage wind farms. Because of changes in the climate, intensity of storms knocks out wind farms on coastlines.”

There was a definite bias against wind. As I tried to understand the security implications of wind, the system stated as fact: “Large wind facilities will require protection from terrorist threats.”

You think I’m making this up, but I’m not.

Meanwhile, Seattle-based Propel Biofuels recently closed a $3.75 million venture round to facilitate its expansion. At the Sustainable Industries Economic Forum in Seattle, CEO Rob Elam posed the question, “What does it mean to have a thoughtful fueling experience?” in describing the company’s approach to differentiating the experience of filling up your car from the mindless task it is currently. “That smug feeling you have driving around in your biodiesel car?…It goes away, especially at $3.65 a gallon,” he said.

Propel has the unique approach of financing biofuel pump add-ons to existing stations (in a different part of the station, outside of the colorful “branded canopy” of course, where everything is controlled by the canopy brand’s owner, such as Chevron or BP), which will allow the company to expand more quickly than if it had to build stations on its own.

In closing, I think it’s interesting that the industry with a perplexing combination of fanciful avoidance of practicality with anticipation of the future — I’m referring to the fashion industry — is starting to face the reality of climate change.

According to Guy Trebay’s Fashion Diary in the New York Times in September, climate change will cause the whole fashion industry to change. As the difference between the seasons vanishes, the entire quarterly cycle of new styles for the next season is thrown on its head. Trebay quoted Beppe Modense, the so-called “founding father of Milan Fashion Week,” saying “People are not prepared to invest in these clothes that, from one season to the other, use the same fabrics at the same weight… The fashion system must adapt to the reality that there is no strong difference between summer and winter anymore.”