Feb 6 2008
The State of Green Business 2008 report unveils the GreenBiz Index to establish benchmarks for measuring the progress of green business.
You know a trend has hit its stride when it starts being quantified. Such is the case for green business as of 2007. For example, Fortune named "Ten Green Giants" in April and Fast Company listed "50 Ways to Green Your Business" in November. On the other side of the coin, TerraChoice listed the "Six Sins of Greenwashing" in November, a study that astoundingly found only a single verifiable green product claim amongst more than a thousand that were shown to be "demonstrably false" or that risked "misleading intended audiences." And economist Eric Janszen warns in a recent Harper's that the stellar growth of cleantech investing may be feeding the economy's need to inflate the next financial bubble.
Green business guru Joel Makower and his team at Greener World Media decided to take a step back to survey the green business landscape. "What yardstick measures green business?" they asked themselves. Logically, they examined the thousands of headlines appearing on their four websites -- GreenBiz.com, ClimateBiz.com, GreenerBuildings.com, and GreenerComputing.com - - to identify the "Top Ten Green Stories of 2007." Released in the inaugural State of Green Business 2008 report, the list starts to quantify the status of corporate environmental initiatives last year -- such as increasing climate commitments from the likes of Nike, which intends to go climate-neutral by 2011, and Green Mountain Power, which is nearing zero-carbon status with just two percent of its 2006 fuel mix from carbon-emitting sources (compared to 70 percent for U.S. utilities.)
However, even these first examples from the report point to landmines buried beneath the surface. In its infamous "Little Green Lies" issue, BusinessWeek critiqued the "fuzzy math" of Nike's "eco-accolades" from WWF, unearthing anomalies in the company's claim of 18 percent carbon reductions such as claiming carbon cuts achieved by public schools it funded through a Oregon Energy Department tax-credit program. And almost half (43 percent) of Green Mountain Power's 2006 energy mix came of Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, which may be "carbon-free" but does not qualify as "green" for many environmentalists.
To measure this uneven ground, Makower and his colleagues created the GreenBiz Index, grading environmental progress in 20 categories on a three- tier ranking of "swimming," "treading," or "sinking." Half of the categories stand on even ground ("treading"), with eight gaining ground ("swimming") and two -- e-waste and carbon intensity -- losing ground. Carbon intensity illustrates a primary problem identified by GreenBiz -- that economic growth can offset, or even erase and negate, incremental improvements in lowering carbon emissions.
"The good news is that we've become more efficient," Makower said in an interview with me on Corporate Watchdog Radio. "It's dropped some seventy million tons of C02 per dollar of GDP since 2001."
"The bad news is that the overall amount of carbon hasn't dropped much -- it just started dropping a little bit in 2006 for the first time, and we don't yet know about 2007," he added. "Going down 1.5 percent in one year is a good thing, but we need to be making much bigger changes. If we continue to do business as usual -- gradual efficiency -- it's not going to get us anywhere close to the goals that we need to be achieving."
Perhaps the biggest finding of the report (which Fortune writer Marc Gunther characterized as a "must-read for anyone interested in green business") was what it couldn't find. There is insufficient data available on such hot-button issues at the intersection of business and the environment as green job creation and water efficiency. If "what gets measured gets managed," as the well-worn saying goes, then this report should act as a kick-in-the- seat-of-the-pants not only for improving the trajectory of green business statistics, but also for generating the metrics necessary to track progress toward business sustainability.