APPLE Puts Climate Change Above Investment Returns !

Wow, what a story;  what a game change for the business world.  For those pure environmentalist, who do not believe the corporate world can be part of the solution, not just part of the proverbial problem, we offer this as evidence of the incredible power of company leadership to positive change.

Kudos, of course, to Apple for reshuffling their priorities.  We believe, though, this is part of a growing trend and responds to the investment community who has started to place a heavy emphasis on backing companies that have a great corporate social responsibility story to tell.  Apple is ahead of the curve, no doubt, but the business curve is definitely leaning green.

Good story giving us, at the business side of green, good feelings.

Please see this story and much more at our main site:   http://renewablenow.biz/main.html

Tim Cook to Apple Investors: Drop Dead



Apple CEO Tim Cook tells Investors Who Care More About Return on Investment than Climate Change: Your Money is No Longer Welcome

As Board Member Al Gore Cheers the Tech Giant's Dedication to Environmental Activism, Investors Left to Wonder Just How Much Shareholder Value is Being Destroyed in Efforts to Combat "Climate Change"

Free-Market Activist Presents Shareholder Resolution to Computer Giant Apple Calling for Transparency on Environmental Issues; Company Balks

Cupertino, CA / Washington DC - At the annual meeting of Apple shareholders in Cupertino, California, Apple CEO Tim Cook informed investors that are primarily concerned with making reasonable economic returns that their money is no longer welcome.

The message came in response to the National Center for Public Policy Research's shareholder resolution asking the tech giant to be transparent about its environmental activism and a question from the National Center about the company's environmental initiatives.

"Mr. Cook made it very clear to me that if I, or any other investor, was more concerned with return on investment than reducing carbon dioxide emissions, my investment is no longer welcome at Apple," said Justin Danhof, Esq., director of the National Center's Free Enterprise Project.

Danhof also asked Apple CEO Tim Cook about the company's green energy pursuits. Danhof asked whether the company's environmental investments increased or decreased the company's bottom line. After initially suggesting that the investments make economic sense, Cook said the company would pursue environmental goals even if there was no economic point at all to the venture. Danhof further asked if the company's projects would continue to make sense if the federal government stopped heavily subsidizing alternative energy. Cook completely ignored the inquiry and became visibly agitated.

Danhof went on to ask if Cook was willing to amend Apple's corporate documents to indicate that the company would not pursue environmental initiatives that have some sort of reasonable return on investment - similar to the concession the National Center recently received from General Electric. This question was greeted by boos and hisses from the Al gore contingency in the room.

"Here's the bottom line: Apple is as obsessed with the theory of so-called climate change as its board member Al Gore is," said Danhof. "The company's CEO fervently wants investors who care more about return on investments than reducing CO2 emissions to no longer invest in Apple. Maybe they should take him up on that advice."

"Although the National Center's proposal did not receive the required votes to pass, millions of Apple shareholders now know that the company is involved with organizations that don't appear to have the best interest of Apple's investors in mind," said Danhof. "Too often investors look at short-term returns and are unaware of corporate policy decisions that may affect long-term financial prospects. After today's meeting, investors can be certain that Apple is wasting untold amounts of shareholder money to combat so-called climate change. The only remaining question is: how much?"

The National Center's shareholder resolution noted that "[s]ome trade associations and business organizations have expanded beyond the promotion of traditional business goals and are lobbying business executives to pursue objectives with primarily social benefits. This may affect Company profitability and shareholder value. The Company's involvement and acquiescence in these endeavors lacks transparency, and publicly-available information about the Company's trade association memberships and related activities is minimal. An annual report to shareholders will help protect shareholder value."

Apple's full 2014 proxy statement is available here. The National Center's proposal, "Report on Company Membership and Involvement with Certain Trade Associations and Business Organizations," appears on page 60.

The National Center filed the resolution, in part, because of Apple's membership in the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA), one of the country's largest trade associations. In its 2013 "Retail Sustainability Report," RILA states: "Companies will often develop individual or industry voluntary programs to reduce the need for government regulations. If a retail company minimizes its waste generation, energy and fuel usage, land-use footprint, and other environmental impacts, and strives to improve the labor conditions of the workers across its product supply chains, it will have a competitive advantage when regulations are developed."

"This shows that rather than fighting increased government regulation, RILA is cooperating with Washington, D.C.'s stranglehold on American business in a misguided effort to stop so-called climate change," said Danhof. "That is not an appropriate role for a trade association."

For even more information on RILA, read "The Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA): A Cartel that Threatens Innovation and Competitiveness," by National Center Senior Fellow Dr. Bonner Cohen.

"Rather than opting for transparency, Apple opposed the National Center's resolution," noted Danhof. "Apple's actions, from hiring of President Obama's former head of the Environmental Protection Agency Lisa Jackson, to its investments in supposedly 100 percent renewable data centers, to Cook's antics at today's meeting, appear to be geared more towards combating so-called climate change rather than developing new and innovative phones and computers."

After Danhof presented the proposal, a representative of CalPERS rose to object and stated that climate change should be one of corporate America's primary concerns, and after she called carbon dioxide emissions a "mortal danger," Apple board member and former vice president Al Gore turned around and loudly clapped and cheered.

"If Apple wants to follow Al Gore and his chimera of climate change, it does so at its own peril," said Danhof. "Sustainability and the free market can work in concert, but not if Al Gore is directing corporate behavior."

"Tim Cook, like every other American, is entitled to his own political views and to be an activist of any legal sort he likes on his own time," said Amy Ridenour, chairman of the National Center for Public Policy Research. "And if Tim Cook, private citizen, does not care that over 95 percent of all climate models have over-forecast the extent of predicted global warming, and wishes to use those faulty models to lobby for government policies that raise prices, kill jobs and retard economic growth and extended lifespans in the Third World, he has a right to lobby as he likes. But as the CEO of a publicly-held corporation, Tim Cook has a responsibility to, consistent with the law, to make money for his investors. If he'd rather be CEO of the Sierra Club or Greenpeace, he should apply."
"As in the past, Cook took but a handful of questions from the many shareholders present who were eager to ask a question at the one meeting a year in which shareholder questions are taken," added Ridenour, "leaving many disappointed. Environmentalism may be a byword at Apple, but transparency surely is not." - See more at: http://renewablenow.biz/corporate-green.html#APPLE

For Today's radio show/Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics, and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound

Today we interview one of the authors of this fascinating book, Robert Whitcomb, Editorial page Editor of the Providence Journal.  Below is a review that appeared in the NY Times of their book, which will give you a feel for today's discussion.

As always we welcome your feedback and insight:

Air Power

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By ROBERT SULLIVAN

Published: June 17, 2007

If HBO is looking to develop a series based on environmental politics, then “Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics, and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound” is a natural for the option, with the Kennedys sitting in for the Sopranos, Nantucket Sound for the Meadowlands and phrases like “environmental impact statement” replacing “swimming with the fishes.” Cameos will include Elizabeth Taylor as the former wife of the anti-wind-farm Senator John Warner; Warner’s former mother-in-law Bunny Mellon, the nonagenarian Listerine heiress who decorated the Kennedy White House (behind the scenes) and helped establish the Oyster Harbors Club; and Walter Cronkite, who, as the co-authors Wendy Williams and Robert Whitcomb have it, starts out on the side of darkness only to turn toward the light, or in this case, the wind. The setting is Horseshoe Shoal, about five miles off the coast of Cape Cod, where, in 2001, an energy developer named Jim Gordon proposed what he still hopes will be America’s first offshore wind farm, an array of 130 turbines, 440 feet tall, that would create 468 megawatts of electrical energy, the only dangerous fumes being those emanating from the mad-as-hell multimillion-dollar homeowners on the Cape, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.

CAPE WIND

Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics, and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound.

By Wendy Williams and Robert Whitcomb.

Illustrated. 326 pp. Public Affairs. $26.95.

Related

First Chapter: ‘Cape Wind’ (June 17, 2007)

Williams, a Cape Cod-based journalist, and Whitcomb, the editorial page editor of The Providence Journal, have set out to show the political machinations behind the gale-force resistance to the project. Offshore wind farming is not a particularly radical endeavor; like inner-city congestion pricing (to name another proposed measure that has raised a loud cry of opposition, in this case in New York City), offshore wind farms have been successfully implemented in Europe. In March, Spain managed to get 27 percent of its total energy supply from wind. Criticism of wind power has been mitigated by increasingly efficient turbines and more bird-sensitive placement. Considering the acid-rain-laced option of coal-fired energy and the lingering fear of nuclear power, wind would seem poised to become a major player in America’s alternative energy plans.
But not off Cape Cod, if the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound can help it. A great summer beach read about longtime summer beach communities, “Cape Wind” describes how the alliance managed to raise $4 million in one ballroom meeting at the Wianno Club, where the “grass-roots” campaign against the “industrial complex” of offshore “Cuisinarts” was kicked off by Douglas Yearley, a copper mining executive whose company was fined for killing birds in an acid runoff mishap in 2000, among other infractions. (With a 7,700-square-foot home on Nantucket Sound, Yearley, the 1993 Copper Man of the Year, was a sitting duck for wind-farm supporters when he praised “sustainable living” to a Massachusetts newspaper columnist.) Maneuvering quietly behind each anti-wind-farm maneuver, despite his often green legislation and his labor backers’ support of the energy project, is the senior senator from Massachusetts, who is accused of bogging down the wind farm in Congress, where today, having been approved by Massachusetts, Cape Wind is going through its last regulatory review hurdles. When told that the turbines would be only barely visible on the horizon from Hyannisport, Ted Kennedy is quoted (secondhand) as replying, “But don’t you realize, that’s where I sail.” Even Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a noted environmentalist, makes a bizarre appearance on a radio talk show, lumping the wind power proponents in with “polluters.” (If built, the wind farm could provide up to 79 percent of the energy for Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, and cut down on the oil barges that have polluted the shores of Rhode Island.) The best the alliance can come up with are poorly disguised Nimby-isms that declare other places worthier of what the Martha’s Vineyard-based historian David McCullough calls “visual pollution.”
“Cape Wind” is less an argument for wind power than an indictment of our money-soaked political process, but the indictment suffers when Williams and Whitworth match the snarkiness of the alliance with snarkiness of their own. “It seemed as though the pastels crowd, normally adherents to the green-slacks-with-little-blue-fish craze, had dressed for war,” the authors note in describing an appearance by Mitt Romney, then the governor and now a Republican presidential candidate, at a press event in March 2005. Romney is portrayed as a tool of the alliance, a fallen would-be environmentalist who is hard on polluting power plants but ends up speechifying for the public’s beaches even though the beaches along Nantucket Sound are mostly private. Even for a wind book, there’s too much about Romney’s unrufflable hair.
And then there is their near-hagiographical portrait of Jim Gordon, the entrepreneur behind Cape Wind. “He would go for the sunshine, opt for the high road, take his case to the nation’s journalists and make sure everyone knew what was going on,” the authors gush. But painting the working-class, Boston-raised green power advocate too clean makes the reader wary, for no good reason. Besides, something about Gordon’s public relations strategy was obviously off, or maybe it’s a matter of public priorities. As The Boston Globe noted two years into the six-year (and counting) battle, the Danes brought in wind power as more of a public trust, with a farm just off Copenhagen’s harbor, the Danish government promoting it, subsidizing it, splitting ownership between the municipal utility and 8,500 individuals.
Scandinavians have also pointed out to the fossil-fuel-addicted public that wind power has been with us before, even in New York, where opposition is beginning to build to a wind farm on Long Island, off Jones Beach State Park. A few of the old windmills on Long Island are still there, antiques among the Hamptons’ over-air-conditioned mansions. There used to be one in Lower Manhattan too, on the site of what became the World Trade Center.

Robert Sullivan is the author of “Rats” and “Cross Country.”

Sun shines on New York solar energy boom by Staff Writers New York (AFP) Feb 23, 2014

The good news continues to pour in on the solar side.  Kudos to NY for opening the doors to some very large sites:

"On a rooftop in the Bronx far from the skyscrapers of Manhattan, 4,760 panels soak up the winter rays. Welcome to the solar power boom in New York state.

Robert Kline, director of commercial sales for the Ross Solar Group that installed the panels, is delighted.

"It is the largest (solar) installation in the history of New York City," he tells AFP.

The 1.6-megawatt installation on the Jetro Cash and Carry has been proudly singled out by New York governor Andrew Cuomo as a prime example of a drive to haul the state into a new dawn.

New York has long lagged behind California and even neighboring states, let alone Europe, when it comes to generating solar energy, but that is slowly changing.

In 2012, Cuomo set up the public-private NY-Sun Initiative with $800 million, and 300 megawatts of solar capacity have since been installed in the state, more than during the previous 10 years.

Cuomo now wants to extend the program until 2023 with an additional nearly $1 billion to generate another 3,000 megawatts.

Experts say that would create 13,000 jobs and bring down greenhouse emissions by 2.3 million tonnes a year.

California and Arizona are home to more than 80 percent of solar installations in the United States, but Cory Honeyman -- a solar analyst at GTM Research -- says New York is coming into its own.

"New York definitively is one of the hotter markets to watch, as we expect a really significant ramp up in build out of projects for both residential and non-residential markets," he said.

- Public awareness on the rise -

This is a godsend for more than 400 specialized companies competing for their share of the ballooning market.

In the Bronx, one of them, OnForce Solar, saw its revenue triple last year and hopes to double it again this year, chief executive officer Charles Feit told AFP.

He says he has doubled, even tripled staff every year since he started and that it was the economic argument that was driving business home.

"Politically, the winds are with us... public awareness has definitely risen," said Feit at his large premises where several new offices are in the process of being built.

"In New York City, there is so much opportunity," agreed David Sandbank, OnForce president and vice president of the New York Solar Energy Industries Association.

While Manhattan is a problem due to strict regulations, other boroughs are full of huge rooftops and business owners looking to save on some of the highest electricity costs in the country.

Sandbank said the NY-Sun Initiative was intended to pave the way for a stable solar industry and said some specialist firms from California have now expanded to New York.

"With longevity and transparency, we're creating an industry," he told AFP, adding 3,300 new jobs had already been created.

Jetro Cash and Carry hopes to save 40 percent of their $250,000 electricity bill a year, says Kline.

Contracts are pouring in and Cuomo recently promised grants to schools that build solar panels.

Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg also announced last year that a solar energy farm would be built in 2015 at Freshkills, a former landfill on Staten Island.

It is to be the largest solar farm in New York, capable of producing 10 megawatts of electricity.

But it's a long road ahead.

Solar energy represents one percent of renewable energy production in the United States, itself 12 percent of total electricity production, according to the Energy Information Administration.

The US solar energy market grew nearly 30 percent from 2012 to 2013 and Honeyman says it could overtake world leader Germany in terms of new builds in 2014 for the first time in 15 years."

Melting Glacier Reveals Hidden Secret

Red Carpet Turns Green

We recently ran a story on Tesla's sights on some of its competitors, including BMW, deemed, in that report, the auto manufacturer most capable of over taking Tesla's lead on EV's.  Here's, perhaps, more evidence of that view.  

Clearly, there investment in reducing the overall weight of the car, here with carbon-filled wheels, allows them to power their EV's further on a single charge, as it allows their fossil-fueled cars to improve their MPG ratings.  All the while engineering great, agile cars:

BMW flashes a carbon-fiber wheel of its near future

By Matt DavisFebruary 26, 2014 12:34 PMMotoramic

A few days ago, BMW held a press introduction of various carbon-fiber accessories, designed to eventually filter their way into several BMW, Rolls-Royce, and maybe even Mini models. The best of the bunch was this handsome full carbon-fiber wheel, shown here in 20-inch size, set to join the options list for BMW's "i" series electric vehicles by the end of 2014.

This aero wheel design goes through all of the same stages of production as the all-important passenger safety cells of all BMW i cars. The eventual asking price for these sweeties is yet unknown, but hold on to your heart medication. Carbon fiber has been the material of the future in cars for a couple of decades now, but using it in wheels has several hurdles — not just cost but fragility; you can dent a metal wheel, but a plastic one shatters. 

This application of BMW Group's new carbon-fiber philosophy for lightweight everything on the road to big jumps in energy efficiency creates wheels that are 25 percent lighter than the equivalent dimension wheel made of their carbon-aluminum combo standard on i models; versus the equivalent forged aluminum wheel, weight savings hit 35 percent.

I picked up the cast aluminum, forged aluminum, hybrid carbon-aluminum, and then this carbon-fiber wheel. The carbon-fiber wheel was dramatically lighter, a huge potential benefit not just for efficiency but for handing.

What about a X5 SUV or for a big 7 Series L? BMW experts say these wheels will fit those massive models without any additional stress risks or safety issues.

And those parallel parking scuff marks? Easier to get rid of them, with the proper resins worked correctly, than losing them from any aluminum wheelset.

Stunning Map Shows What A Worst Case Climate Change Scenario Might Look Like

We'll give you the link to this article, from Business Insider, so you can get the full view of the map.

Talk about a new realty.  Pretty stunning.  You can imagine, I'm sure, the environmental and economic impact around the globe.  How do you prepare for the magnitude of these types of physical changes to our planet?

LINK:  http://www.businessinsider.com/climate-change-map-2014-2

"Just about all scientists agree that global climate change is likely caused by humans, and the impact on the environment can come in a variety of ways.

Since the change occurs slowly, it's hard to imagine rising temperatures, warmer oceans, extreme weather, and rising sea levels. But amateur graphic designer Martin Vargic has put together an interesting map that shows how entire countries could end up being redefined if nothing is done.

Vargic's map depicts the planet without the polar ice caps — bringing a major rise in sea levels that would envelope shorelines and regions near sea level.

Vargic explains on DeviantArt:

According to recent studies, there is enough ice in Earth's polar caps to cause about 250-300 ft(80 - 100 m) rise of the sea level. Result of such an event would be catastrophic to human civilization and earth's biosphere. More than 75% of the world's population lives below 300 ft above the sea level, including the vast majority of all large metropolitan areas.

Vargic, a full-time student in Slovakia, worked for approximately 8 hours a day for three months to create this new map. It's entirely digitally hand-drawn, he says, and based on gathered topography data.

"I created these maps both to raise awareness about global warming and also for artistic purposes, [because] nobody has yet done similar map on such a scale," Vargic told Business Insider in an email. "Although the 260 ft rise of the sea levels is a little bit extreme scenario, it could become reality in the end of the millennium."

You can see his full map and zoom in on the detail at his website, HalcyonMaps."

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/climate-change-map-2014-2#ixzz2uiZWIhaG