Climate Change

The Aspen Institute First Movers Fellowship Program today announced its 2016 class of Fellows who are working within companies to help solve the world's most challenging social and environmental problems. First Movers is the leading global network of intrapreneurs and equips Fellows with the skills and confidence to drive innovations inside companies that add value to the organization and positively impact the lives of consumers, employees and communities.

For the Amah Mutsun, an indigenous people of the central coast, the land was never ‘theirs.’ They didn’t think of the land as belonging to anyone. Blessed to live along the central coast and eastward, they belonged to the land. They were tender toward it — and tenders of it. Now, after centuries of cultural upheaval, they’re learning to recover their roles as the land’s stewards. ...

Since the Paris Climate Conference wrapped up last December, 50 cities and companies have posted new climate initiatives in a United Nations-sanctioned registry called the Non-State Actor Zone for Climate Action (NAZCA). By spotlighting some 11,000 commitments cities, companies, regions, and investors have made since 2014, the U.N.

Utilities are increasingly getting it right on the customer satisfaction front, but a rising tide leads to even more competition for the utility industry's top spots. Some industry frontrunners have seen their leads erode over time as their fellow utilities gain ground in the annual review. What can utilities do to stay ahead?

In detailing their much-scrutinized marriage and love story at the Democratic National Convention, former President Bill Clinton also took care to list his wife’s numerous legislative and foreign policy achievements. Among them: "She put climate change at the center of our foreign policy. She negotiated the first agreement ever — ever — where China and India officially committed to reduce their emissions."

Cornell University biological engineers have deciphered the cellular strategy to make bioethanol, using an anaerobic microbe feeding on carbon monoxide – a common industrial waste gas. “Instead of having the waste go to waste, you make it into something you want,” said Ludmilla Aristilde, assistant professor in biological and environmental engineering. “In order to make the microbes do our work, we had to figure out how they work, their metabolism.”

Fellow Heather Coleman of Oxfam America writes we need to chart a more coherent climate finance policy agenda and determine how progress on climate will be measured.

Given the existing low-cost competition in a no-growth market, renewable developers face tough investment challenges absent new policies. A carbon tax could substantially increase market demand for renewable power and encourage the retirement of pollution-intensive coal-fired power plants.

Chris Madsen needed a career change. After owning and operating his own construction business for over 20 years, a hand injury propelled him to look in other directions. At 45, the father of two enrolled in the plant operations program at Walla Walla Community College. “An area that is focused on heavily [in the program] is the chemical process we use in order to utilize bioenergy,” says Madsen, who also completed a summer internship at biorefinery developer ZeaChem, an industry partner of the Advanced Hardwood Biofuels Northwest project.