Nonetheless, this is a great article on too big to fail banks rejecting or withdrawing financing for mountaintop removal of coal and other environmental destruction.  I am taking a lot of entrepreneurship courses right now and I will donate some MBA wisdom to the likes of Massey Energy (one of the main mountaintop removal companies);

If the big banks (none of whom are really known for stellar ethics) are unwilling to loan your balance sheet rich business money due to how you make your profit, it might be time to alter your business model. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/business/energy-environment/31coal.html?hp

http://www.carbonprinciples.com/

B shares have 8x the voting rights yet have traded much lower than A shares.

B shares carried a tax liability until sometime in 2010 since they were given to Cyprus Semiconductor shareholders. 

Other than that they are exactly the same.  They are finally coming close to the same price but not yet.  It's interesting how long this is taking.  In a perfect capital market........

A new energy initiative, modeled after the department of defense funding, is "investing" (although it's not clear if taxpayers see the return) in new clean tech mostly in the fuel space.  This industry needed to grow and scale 30 years ago, but the question is can it now?  VC's and other early stage investors are hesitant to invest so how do we make this happen without government?  Well, maybe the government should become LP's in a hybrid venture fund but they shouldn't be the ones picking the companies, there's a conflict of interest and inexperience.  One of the qualities a good investor brings to the table is experience building solid companies and most of the people in the fed energy dept simply don't have that and they are likely going to end up throwing away more of our money. 

Then again, what's $400 million with $13 Trillion in national debt?? I'm sure we find ways to waste more than that in an hour. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/19/business/energy-environment/19fuel.html?pagewanted=1&hpw

With my work at Walmart this summer I've gotten to understand the practice of LCA (Life Cycle Analysis).  Basically, it's a tool that helps identify environmental (and perhaps very soon social) "hotspots" within a supply chain. 

Usually intuition is correct but sometimes the findings can be very surprising.  For instance, 97%ish of the impact in the manufacture of a lightbulb (CFL or incan) is from the consumer use phase.  All the mining, manufacture, transport, storage, etc makes a fraction of the carbon impact of what happens when the lightbulb is screwed in.  This analysis can also make for interesting environmental dilemmas like the Local British lamb having a higher carbon footprint than New Zealand lamb even when eaten in London! 

You can see an interesting take on LCA with the Open Input Output project, created by the Sustainability Consortium here:

http://openio.walton.uark.edu/visualize.asp

While LCA has a long way to go to achieve total supply chain transparency when I saw this photo below I was wondering how long it will be before we (consumers, suppliers, large energy users) know how much of this specific coal from this former mountaintop in WV is going to burn our lightbulb.  Would that make your house more energy efficient?  Maybe OPOWER should send this picture with their energy consumption data once they are armed with the data of where this coal is going?

That's one of the things about Life Cycle Analysis that is really neat.  I would venture to say that the environmental and social impact of a can of Coke vs. an plastic bottle of Honest Tea would almost wash each other out to be equal.  The Honest tea would score slightly higher on the social but the Coke would probably be better on the environmental/carbon impact due to economies of scale.

Two thoughts: 1) Was Honest Tea ever a "sustainable" company? trucking around sweetened (cane sugar or High fructose doesn't really matter) water in plastic bottles with refrigation to sell a product that could be made with a tea bag and cup/bottle of water?  Is it actually greener now that it has the logistical efficiencies of the Coke distribution system? 

2) Is there really any other way to bring a beverage to mass market without Coke or Pepsi?  Odwalla was left with the same fate years ago.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/business/smallbusiness/08sbiz.html?src=me&ref=business

Generation Investment Management Partners make a case for longer time horizons for financial industry compensation.  It's hard for me to understand who would argue against this other than the people benefiting from the short sightedness of Wall St. bonus culture but the authors still get hammered in the comments section. 

They say "Before the crisis and since, we (and others) have called for a more long-term and responsible form of capitalism—what we call "sustainable capitalism." Sustainable capitalism seeks to maximize long-term value creation. It explicitly integrates environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors into strategy, the measurement of outputs, and the assessment of both risks and opportunities. Sustainable capitalism challenges us to generate financial return in a long-term and responsible manner."

I think this is a part of sustainable cap but maybe not a totally encompassing view. Sust cap shouldn't solely exist to generate financial return.  Why can't we also measure environmental and social return on investment?  No, it's not as straight forward but it's certainly possible.  

Additionally, these guys only offer investment products to high net worth investors.  It's kind of like the Whole Foods state of mind that says only rich people are "enlightened" enough to have healthy food.  Additionally, you can see their portofolio of investments here:  http://www.stockpickr.com/port/Al-Gore-Generation-Investment-Management/ and as someone who follows this space pretty closely I can't find more than a few companies in their top 30 that have sustainability embedded in their company.     

Alas, then I read something like this in the New York Times. 

""Mr. Obama had hoped to spend his summer creating jobs, passing financial reform, promoting his health care program, getting a Supreme Court justice confirmed and an arms control treaty with Russia ratified, pressing for international sanctions against Iran and jump-starting the troubled Middle East peace process. While not abandoning any of those goals, Mr. Obama now must find ways to continue pushing them while demonstrating to the nation that he is concentrating on a spill he has called “our highest priority.”

“This has hijacked his entire legislative agenda,” said Douglas Brinkley, a historian at Rice University who has written about Jimmy Carter, whose presidency was consumed by the Iran hostage crisis. “The White House felt they were on a roll. They were looking to be a new New Deal or new Great Society and they were just getting momentum going. Something this awful has sidetracked the agenda.”

How could job creation, health care reform, arms control, and mid-east peace connect to the biggest oil spill our country has ever seen? 

Well, I think with less need for oil, and any natural resource we have less need for violence.  Renewables obviously can create jobs.  Once we can create more energy here we can keep more of our dollars here, creating more tax dollars here, potentially providing more money for health care. 

That being said Douglas Brinkley is actually a great author who wrote "The Great Deluge", probably one of the most balanced researched recountings of Katrina and everything that conspired before the storm all the way to the early 1900's.

 http://www.amazon.com/Great-Deluge-Hurricane-Katrina-Mississippi/dp/0061124230

However, a much more relevant, deep connection is happening with RSF Social Finance's new creation of their own prime rate.  They are bringing investors and borrowers into the same room....to meet each other.....to discuss the appropriate interest rate for their transaction.....check it out.

http://rsfsocialfinance.org/2009/11/announcing-rsf-prime/

http://amzn.to/dpkrlh

However, this example was of two guys at a restuarant in San Francisco where one bumped the other's iphone to pay for his share of the meal.  Was it really too much trouble to scan your card?  Is your life that busy?  Is this really chaning the way we interact with money/value? 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/technology/29cashless.html?hp

If you want to see the real innovation in the way people percieve/ view their money check out the latest RSF Social Finance newsletter with articles by Don Schaffer of RSF, Leslie Christian of Portofolio 21, and more.

http://rsfsocialfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2010/04/2010-Q2-Social-Finance-Quarterly-lo-res.pdf