Smart cities need smart buildings connected to a smart grid. The business opportunities associated with Demand Response, smart buildings, and smart grid have been gaining a lot of attention recently, with articles just last week in The Economist and Barron’s. Last summer a Cisco executive caused some ripples by forecasting that the convergence of IT [...]
This post is by my colleague Lucia Silva Gao, Assistant Professor of Finance, College of Management, University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her research focuses on the relationship between environmental and financial performance.
On January 27, 2010 the SEC voted to issue interpretive guidance on disclosure requirements of climate risks in SEC filings. The SEC stressed that [...]
Business and Climate Change in the Post-Copenhagen Era
By David L. Levy
(This is an updated version of an earlier posting)
President Obama’s decision to speak at the COP-15 climate summit in Copenhagen in December 2009 cannot have been easy. Obama surely did not want to invest his shrinking political capital in backing the doomed international conference, but [...]
David L. O’Connor argued in the prior post, Carbon Offsets Reduce Compliance Costs, that offsets available under the proposed Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill in the US would help reduce the cost of carbon allowances by about 70%, on average, between 2012 and 2050. The Kerry-Boxer version that emerged out of the Senate in early October has [...]
By David L. Levy
Carbon comes in many forms: depending on how the atoms are arranged, carbon can be a tough brilliant diamond, a rigid bucky-ball, a super-strong nanotube, soft graphite, or a lump of coal. These forms have very different properties and uses – diamonds are not the best fuel for generating electric power. [...]
This is a guest contribution by Drs. Timo Busch and Volker Hoffman, Professors at ETH Zurich, Group for Sustainability and Technology. It’s based on their recent article Corporate Carbon Performance Indicators in the Journal of Industrial Ecology. It moves toward a clear and operational definition of carbon intensity, dependency, exposure, and risk.
The world faces twin [...]
by David L. Levy
Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts announced September 1st nearly $1 million in grants for educational programs that will enhance training for the state’s burgeoning clean energy industry. This is good news for climate change, for Massachusetts, and particularly for me, because a group I’m leading at the University of Massachusetts, Boston was [...]
This guest contribution is by Drs. Ans Kolk and Jonatan Pinkse, professors at the University of Amsterdam Business School, The Netherlands. Earlier this year, their book International Business and Global Climate Change was published by Routledge. Dr. Ans Kolk has focused on business strategy and climate strategy for a number of years, and we have [...]
by David L. Levy
Managing crises in complex systems
Just when the world was beginning to wake up to the climate change crisis, with a flood of new evidence on the accelerating meltdown of glaciers and polar ice caps, the financial crisis struck. Paul Gilding has termed this convergence of twin crises “The Great Disruption.” At first [...]
by David L. Levy
A managerial and behavioral lens on low-cost carbon reductions
I’m writing this response to Jürgen Weiss and Mark Sarro’s excellent guest contribution while looking out of my antiquated and rusting steel casement windows in Brookline, Mass. These single pane windows, which date to the1951 construction of the house, are wintertime energy hogs [...]
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