BEP Blogs – Page 15 – The Business Environmental Program

Nevada Woody Collaborative Meeting

Please make plans to attend the Nevada Woody Biomass Collaborative’s teleconference/meeting on Thursday, September 2, 2010, from 2:00 P.M. to 4:00 P.M. We will be meeting in Ely, Las Vegas and Carson City at UNR’s Cooperative Extension Offices (addresses below). We will be fortunate to have the USFS’s leading authority on the Fuel’s For Schools program, Dave Atkins, from Missoula, Montana, in person in Carson City. Dave will explain the program, how it worked (and, cases points, where it didn’t). Nevada has only one such program still operating and needs more to make use of locally-sourced woody biomass.

Dusty Moller will be in Carson City, giving a review of woody biomass happenings over the past months as well as previewing the upcoming Pinyon/Juniper Summit that’s slated for December in Ely, Nevada. We’ll be getting updates from Nevada Department of Forestry, BLM and USFS attendees and the rest of our utilization partners. So, mark your calendars, post your Facebooks and Blackberries or chalk mark your sundial, Tweet—whatever it takes to get you to one of these Coop Extension locations, on time, on Thursday, September 2, from 2 P.M. to 4 P.M.:

Ely: 996 Compton Street
Carson City: 2621 Northgate Lane
Las Vegas: 8050 S Maryland Parkway (@ Windmill Lane exit on the 215)

Will the Great Basin Finally Get The Attention That It So Ecologically Deserves?

An ad hoc group of concerned stakeholders, the PJ Partnership, is gathering steam. The groups goal is to establish a landscape-scaled demonstration project in Northeast Nevada aimed at rangeland restoration. The target of this project is the incursive Pinyon Pine and Single Needle Juniper, affectionately known as PJ. There are literally millions of tons of the small trees/large bushes which also bear the classification of “biomass” located throughout the 40,000 square miles that constitute the Great Basin.

There are many problems with the PJ. It’s an incursive species—leaving its natural ranges. Each tree aspires more than 50 gallons of water each day. It’s crowding out sagebrush and affecting the Sage Grouse populations. And it’s one hell of a fire hazard. It catches fire easily. Hundreds of thousands of acres burn, releasing carbon to the air. The list goes on and on.

Solutions? Well, the Federal land managers—mainly BLM and USFS—are using what funds they do have to practice “restoration forestry”—largely thinning out the trees and chipping or grinding them in place. There is no lumber to be had and no market for the chips. We hope that’s soon to change.

You can make stuff out of PJ biomass—mulch, compost, fire bricks—easily enough. There is the potential to haul the chips to a power-plant and co-fire the coal with some of the chips. There is one chip boiler in the state—White Pine school district—but it only uses 500 tons per year. Some scientists are investigating bio-char (charcoal for soil amendment) and cellulosic ethanol products.

Two big questions remain—Will Congress be able to provide the hundreds of millions of dollars to restore the rangelands and watershed? And, more importantly, will the Partnership gain the “social license” to complete the tasks?

Making Sense of Waste

Too often, I find business owners putting stress on themselves and their businesses over their high operating costs. What most fail to realize is that there is waste being generated all around them, and it’s not just waste for disposal; it’s also a waste of money. Whether it is hazardous waste destined for a treatment facility or a simple air leak in your pneumatic tool line, it is costing you money.

It is very easy to get settled in your ways. It’s human nature. However, also part of human nature is learning. Many businesses, once established, proceed through a behavior of running on auto pilot. It is this very behavior that can be costly. In today’s economy, a business cannot survive without constant evaluation of efficiency and investigation of potential improvements.

How do you go about streamlining your business? Well, there are plenty of websites, greening guides, and courses available. However, it does not have to be that complicated. Without any training, you can start to make your business more efficient RIGHT NOW. That’s right, you can get up from your computer this very instant and get the ball rolling. All you have to do is know where to look.

Each month you pay for materials, electricity, water, waste disposal, etc. Grab those bills. Sit down and look at what you pay each month. You’re already aware of what your bills are, but give them a good hard look. Then look not just at the dollar signs, but also at the quantity for each bill that you are paying for. Every kilowatt hour, gallon of water, case of material, and pound of waste adds up, doesn’t it? Each of these items is an opportunity for your business to become more efficient and reduce costs.

Why do business owners NOT do it?

A brief commentary on factors affecting implementation of energy efficiency in businesses

We are used to buying things – things we can drive, eat, watch… or services that help us get things done, but energy, now that’s a vague word.

And “efficiency” – That’s also a vague word. What does it mean? It’s so relative and hard to pin down, an ineffective marketing term for sure, especially in America where we are trained to like the big, the bold, the conflict ridden… where we like to blow things up, be the biggest and the best and the favorite pastimes are NASCAR and gladiator sports… come on!

So, clearly, from the get go, “energy efficiency” suffers from a serious marketing problem. If anyone can come up with better terminology, I’d like to hear it.

But let’s look at those factors commonly cited as hindering implementation of energy efficiency – I read lists like: “control and regulatory instruments”; “fiscal instruments and incentives”; economic and market-based instruments… or a bit less on the bureaucratese/pedantic side – “lack of knowledge of potential benefits”; “difficulty securing financing”; “lack of experienced workforce”, and etc.

In my experience with energy efficiency, focused on retrofit of buildings for “energy efficient (and comfortable) operation, the key single control factor affecting decision-making is confidence. Yes, CONFIDENCE. Indeed, this observation is well embedded in simple Keynesian economic theory that has, for example, the Great Depression rooted in a self-reinforcing slump in demand aka confidence born of failures in the financial sector to properly regulate itself. Sound familiar?

So what I see in the field are large numbers of businesspeople who are running on fear and uninterested in complex decision-making, difficult to understand forms and procedures, or in vague concepts like “efficiency” and “conservation”. What they mostly know about “energy” is that they’d like to have more of it for themselves… I can demonstrate all day that certain “energy efficiency” measures will “pay for themselves” in just a short time, but my business clients may just as well decide that they just don’t believe the numbers, they are too academic, and they simply do not have the confidence to spend now to save later.

Energy efficiency programs clearly need better marketing, to be simply presented, clear in results, and supported in extremely simple ways.

A plethora of competing programs, obscure and ever-changing paperwork, inconsistent policies and criteria, and a host of other practical problems further challenge us beyond the simple marketing problem to do better with implementing our need to move forward with energy efficiency.

It is generally acknowledged that energy efficiency presents a social least-cost alternative as a main component of our thrust toward a better future, one where we can live in the knowledge that we are doing the right thing, living in a healthy environment, in confidence. Not fear.

Yes, that’s a bit of ribald polemic, but that’s the order for the day… your comments welcome.