The quote continues, “Yes, the environmental movement includes some elements of extremism, nannyism (the word is probably an outgrowth from Dean Baker’s The Conservative Nanny State, May 2006) and self-righteousness. But environmentalism is simply a desire to protect nature and our health and to preserve resources for future generations (our emphasis).  What’s so bad about that? What’s wrong with trying to invent technologies (projects) that are less polluting than oil? Is it unreasonable to want fewer pesticides, fertilizers and other chemicals dumped into waterways (projects)? Are people who recycle newspapers, buy organic foods or carry reusable grocery bags all part of a vast left-wing conspiracy?”

Sometimes, with all that is going on, and plenty of fodder for our posts, we need to revisit the real reason we became involved in our projects, the book and the website.  As a project managers, and founders of the website you are connected to right now, this quote speaks to us.  It says that the founding principles, or “assertions,” of EarthPm are relevant, important, sound, or whatever positive adjective you want to use.

We won’t reiterate our assertions here; you can see them by going to the “Mission” area of this site for full details.  To capture them all in one statement, it is “simply a desire to protect nature and our health and to preserve resources for future generations”. One of the assertions we make during our presentations in that we are not tree huggers, or nannyists.    And, we are not trying to make you that way, either.  However, we do strongly believe that projects are where ideas become real and that by running a project with green intent is the right thing to do, and every project can benefit from green intent.  Project managers are the “resource police”.  To “protect and serve” project resources is in our DNA, so who better to advocate for preserving resources, including environmental resources, than a project manager?  We’ve proposed some changes to the next edition of the PMBOK and are getting lots of support.  Check out our proposal in the “Community” section of this site and we welcome your comments.  Soon we will post an update incorporating comments we’ve received so far.

As is our modus operandi, we provide this tongue-in-cheek look at:

The Nanny Zone

There’s plenty of stuff to decompose in a landfill, from food scraps to lawn trimmings.  It has been happening for years and as natural gas and propane become more and more expensive, a project to recover methane from landfills became more attractive.  From the altruistic point of view, not allowing methane to escape into the air, or being burned off to contribute to green house gases improves air quality.  But face it, the incentives from the government, and the savings from not having to buy fuel on the open market are pretty good project drivers.

According to  Jennifer Andrews, Director of Communications for Waste Management Inc, there are more than 300 trash trucks (the industry likes the name trash truck rather than garbage truck) fueled by garbage, or rather the methane produced by “trash”.   Waste Management (WM) Inc, the country’s largest provider of waste management services, along with Linde North America, a world leading gases and engineering company, built a liquefied natural gas (LNG) landfill gas designed to purify and liquefy the landfill gas at WM’s Altamont Landfill near Livermore, California.  It has a capacity to produce up to 13,000 gallons/day of natural gas to fuel the WM’s trash collection vehicles.

This project is also part of the company’s environmental sustainability initiative to double its waste-based energy production from the equivalent of 1 million homes to 2 million homes by 2020. WM is also directing capital spending of up to $500 million per annum over a 10-year period to increase the fuel efficiency of its fleet by 15 percent and reduce fleet emissions by 15 percent by 2020 as well as investments in new technologies to enhance their business according to their website www.wm.com.

WM and others are continuing to explore landfill gases as alternate fuel sources.  We’ll keep you informed of other projects in the future.  WM is certainly going to make our next “At the Top of Their Game” list for companies who are doing their sustainable best.

The Amazon leader has teamed up with Google (Earth), one of the companies we deem “At the Top of Their Game” in our new book.  Google Earth is  mapping  the tribe’s sacred and cultural sites where tribe members hunt and fish as a “way to show the world my culture.  Information is power” says the chief.  The philosophy is spreading to other tribes in the region, too.  The chief also teamed up with Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) to create an economy based on sustainability practices”, something else we at EarthPM strongly believe in.  “Three years ago, my people began discussing carbon credits as part of this sustainability message,” said Chief Almir. “Many people believe this will not work, but I see it as an opportunity to better manage our forest and, by extension, to manage the world.”  Exactly!

A couple of more things he said that particularly resonate with us, “There’s been a lot of deforestation in the name of development of our country,” he said. “When we sat down and talked about our future, we saw how important it was to bring our knowledge to the rest of the world.”

Many people “do not believe in the message of sustainability, so we bring scientific research to prove it can bring a healthy economy and well-being to the world.”

Chief Almir’s 1,300 tribe members are all vested in a green future, he said.  “We get courage and strength to do what we do in the belief that in the long run, we are right in what we are fighting for,” he said, “to create that green consciousness for our future. Resistance can be done through armed struggle, but we believe it works better through awareness.”

We’ll be listening and watching for more information coming out of the region.  You can also check out ATC’s website, and here’s more information on Chief Almir Narayamoga Surui, including a video.

We’ve all heard the buzz about alternative energy; clean coal, wind power, tidal power, solar power, and nuclear power to name a few.  Traveling around Ireland last year, there was a noticeable increase in wind farms.  The talk around the county is to try to get most, if not all, of the power from the wind.  Everyone in Ireland and those who visit know that it is a windy country, surrounded by the North Sea, in an area of constantly changing weather patterns.  Power generation by wind is still in its infancy.  It may work in a small, unique area like Ireland, and generally on a smaller scale, we need to look to other alternatives for larger applications.

In today’s article in the Wall Street Journal On-line it states that, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), “Nuclear energy is one of the key low-carbon energy technologies that can contribute, alongside energy efficiency, renewable energies and carbon capture and storage, to the decarbonization of electricity supply by 2050, said IEA Executive Director Nobuo Tanaka. I could provide as much as 25% of world-wide energy requirements by 2050. ” That would mean that “nuclear generating capacity to more than triple over the next 40 years.”

Nuclear energy is a proven technology, unlike some of the alternatives.  Director General Luis Echavarri of the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) , a specialized agency within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an intergovernmental organization of industrialized countries, based in Paris, France, says  “Nuclear is already one of the main sources of low-carbon energy today. If we can address the challenges to its further expansion, nuclear has the potential to play a larger role in cutting CO2 emissions”.

To achieve these numbers, there will be a multitude of projects throughout the world requiring project managers.  Beside the project management jobs in the nuclear power plant construction industry, there will be PM jobs in support of nuclear power like plant design, accident prevention and development of safety features.  Just like the oil industry, there will be risks.  Who better to help manage risks than a project manager?

Because we are all interested in the “next best thing” in terms of what the future job market looks like, EarthPm will continue to identify those areas, whether the projects are green by definition, project impact, product impact, or green in general.  We’re not advocating one source of power generation over another, but we do believe that you must be aware of all the alternatives and where the potential future jobs may be.

While most agree that the projects are necessary and inextricably tied together, with the budgetary shortfalls facing most cities, and Portsmouth, NH is no exception, paying for the $63-100 million dollar upgrade to the wastewater treatment plant seems like a pipe dream.  Rough estimates say that the sewer bills for local residents could jump from $600/year to $2000/year immediately.  For those who are just making it now, those who are unemployed or underemployed, that would be disastrous.  But no one said projects didn’t have trade-offs with quality, cost and time, did they?  After all, that’s what project managers are all about, managing those project constraints.  How these projects and the other similar, environment protecting projects, fair in this time economic uncertainly will go a long way to determine not only the persistence of environmental issues, but also the sustainability of the environment itself.  

We all think of Shell as an oil company, but they are big in the natural gas industry, too, having started 30 years ago and continue with innovation. (new projects) “By 2012, we will have more (natural) gas production world-wide than we have oil.”  His answer to the question of what will be needed as far as answering our environmental problems, his answer is “From a global perspective, the demand for energy will double by 2050. So we will need most of the energy forms that we know today.” Look for my next post about an alternative source and it’s not wind or solar, but something very different.)

Finally, his thoughts about future transportation; Mr. Voser thinks that by 2050 we will go from 1 billion cars world-wide to 2 billion cars, and about 40% of those will be electric.  That leaves about 1.2 billion to be fueled by other forms.  So hybrids, low-carbon-fuel cars, and more efficient engines are needed (all new or continuing projects)

There is much more in this Wall Street Journal section that we find very interesting, including a view from “big oil”, and a top ten ranking of “clean-tech” companies.  Look to future posts for some more information on these and other topics.

We wondered how UNH will pay for the project.  The answer is from an article by the EcoLine Partnership.  UNH will sell the renewable energy certificates (RECs) generated by using landfill gas to help finance the overall cost of the project and to invest in additional energy efficiency projects on campus. In addition, UNH will sell power in excess of campus needs back to the electric grid. “By selling the RECs from EcoLine™, UNH will further fund its aggressive plan toward climate neutrality,” says Tom Kelly, UNH chief sustainability officer and director of the office of sustainability. “With this climate action plan, called WildCAP, UNH has committed to lowering its emissions by 50 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2080.”

Of course, WM cannot simply tap the landfill and send it down the pipeline.  The naturally occurring by-product of landfill decomposition is collected via a state-of-the-art collection system consisting of more than 300 extraction wells and miles of collection pipes.  The gas is purified and compressed at a new UNH processing plant at the Waste Management’s Turnkey Recycling and Environmental Enterprise (TREE) in Rochester, N.H.  It then travels through a 12.7-mile-pipeline from the landfill to UNH’s cogeneration plant, where it will replace commercial natural gas as the primary fuel source.

Just in these few paragraphs alone, there were three major projects identified; collection of the methane, the pipeline, power generation conversion at UNH.  While UNH is the first in the nation to do this, we are sure that more and more universities (and business/municipal complexes) will follow, especially those within close proximity to a landfill.  And these days, who isn’t!

While we at EarthPm assert that “a project run with green intent is the right thing to do”, we are also realists.  Businesses cannot stay in business if they constantly lose money on their ventures.  If businesses are to be encouraged to do that right thing, a noble effort, they will also need to “justify” the   bottom-line.  That is why we, along with a lot of other people, say that it is not only the right thing to do, but going green makes cents.

A couple of weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal included a section on the environment, ECO:nomics – Creating Environmental Capital.  In this EarthPM post, we’d like to highlight a couple of the “Best Practices” outlined in the section.  It not only included what works, but also contrasted with what doesn’t work according to some “green leaders”.  For instance, from Steve Fludder, VP Ecomagination, GE (one of the companies featured in our upcoming book), on businesses addressing climate change, a business should “continue to focus on improving your company’s own energy efficiency” (feeds the bottom-line), and “don’t let the current uncertainty over government action become an excuse to stop innovating”.  For financing green projects (of particular interest to us as project managers), Richard Cohen, Managing Director, Environmental Strategic Investment Group, Bank of America, says “create new training and education programs to train the energy work force”, and the current government and regulatory environment “are Byzantine and bureaucratic, and that discourages financing”.  There is much more in this Wall Street Journal section that we find very interesting, including a view from “big oil”, and a top ten ranking of “clean-tech” companies.  Look to future posts for some more information on these and other topics.

This is not the only project the team is working on.  Another one is to collect aluminum cans and plastic bottles for recycling.  To date, in 18 months, the team has collected 11,000 cans and 12,000 plastic bottles.  They also have an awareness campaign for those pesky non-recyclable milk cartons.  They collected them and put them on display to show how many are used.

We, at EarthPm are positive that these efforts are going on across the country and across the world.  Let us know what kinds of projects your area is undertaking to help the environment and to save money.  Who knows, perhaps one or more of those project leaders may qualify for the Shamrock 7™.  Watch this site for the selection criteria coming in July 2010.

This is no April Fools!  On April 1, 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Transportation (DOT), in response to an Obama Administration directive, established new, more stringent Federal Rules that “set the first-ever national greenhouse gas emissions standards and will significantly increase the fuel economy of all new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States. “  According to Lisa P. Jackson, EPA Administrator, “cleaner car standards will be 950,000,000 tons of pollution cut from our skies. They will mean as much as $3,000 dollars in savings for drivers of 2016 model clean cars. And they will mean $2.3 billion dollars that can stay at home in our economy rather than buying oil from overseas.”  She continued, “. We expect to reduce greenhouse emissions by the equivalent of 42,000,000 cars over the life of the program.”

Basically, the new rules establish more stringent fuel economy standards under several programs including the Clean Air Act for vehicles manufactured for 2012 – 2016 model-years.  It will require automakers to reduce gas emissions by approximately 5% per year and strengthen fuel economy standards to 34.1 mpg average by 2016.

According to the EPA press release, “Climate change is the single greatest long-term global environmental challenge. Cars, SUVs, minivans, and pickup trucks are responsible for almost 60 percent of all U.S. transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions.”

The projects envisioned for this change include those within the auto industry that will ripple throughout the business community; more efficient engine design, new materials for all of the parts that go into making vehicles; glass, structural panels, interior parts, whatever.  Less weight means less energy to push (or pull) the vehicle along, so saving ounces adds up.  I’m sure that you can think of lots more projects that could enhance the vehicle’s performance; tire design, even new design for roads and road materials to make vehicles roll with less friction, new testing equipment and testing facilities.  While something like road design won’t make the vehicle more efficient per sec, in the long run, it may add to the reduction of carbon emissions and the overall point of these regulations.  More importantly to the project manager is the awareness of these problems and drivers of the “Green Wave”, will lead to identification of areas of need a vigilant project manager can step in and manage.  After all, we, as project managers, do want to be leading the charge, not trailing it.  For more information on the new regulations, see: http://www.epa.gov/otaq/climate/regulations.htm