Open Air Collective

Open Air Weekly, Ep. 2 | Open Air Collective

In this second installment of OpenAir Weekly Adam chats with superstar collector/OpenAir technical director Chris Chung about VIOLET – what it means, where the idea came from, and where it’s all headed as of October 2020. VIOLET, OpenAir’s founding mission which got us rolling last year, will be the world’s first and only miniature open source direct air carbon capture (DACC) machine.

Chris is one of the key contributors to the project and his energy, creativity, leadership and general commitment to getting sh*t done are keeping us on track and moving us forward to our goal. In this conversation Chris and Adam get into the origins of VIOLET, and discuss the significance of the project within the broader context of both open source/maker culture and Direct Air Carbon Capture (DACC) R&D.

Enjoy!

GARP

Growing greener bonds | GARP

Better standards could help cut climate risk by deepening markets for green debt to fund low-carbon solutions

In the struggle to recover from the COVID-19 economic crash, the European Union has set out to rekindle growth via green stimulus. In early September, European leadership upped the bloc’s already ambitious green goals, aiming to cut emissions 55% by 2030 against 1990 levels, up from an earlier reduction target of 40%.

To fund the effort, Europe mapped out plans to issue €225 billion ($267 billion) in green bonds as part of the overarching €750-billion Next Generation EU coronavirus recovery fund. Some 37% of the fund will target climate-change projects such as hydrogen power, energy-efficient building renovations, and one million electric vehicle charging points, reports The Wall Street Journal.

The program accelerates Europe’s already world-leading push to hit net-zero emissions by 2050, a goal formalized as part of the European Green Deal. As a secondary benefit, a surge of EU-backed green bonds could help transform a nascent market with increased liquidity just as the appetite is growing for long-term, stable, green-tinted investments among insurers, pension funds, endowments, and other long-term investors.

Green bonds are growing quickly, but remain a niche in global debt markets. From less than $1 billion a decade ago, issuance of green bonds eclipsed $250 billion in 2019 (chart, via The Financial Times, or FT), comprising about 3.5% of the global total of $7.15 trillion, according to a recent note from the Bank of International Settlements.

Rising appeal — and challenges

Green bonds offer a way to raise long-term, lower-cost funds for projects that target climate change and/or benefit the environment. Green bonds let companies and governments tap into rising demand for environmentally-focused investments from insurers, pension funds, ESG funds, and the like.

Yet for all their appeal, green bonds are selling a promise of sustainability that, so far, lacks the sort of rigorous rules and rating regimes that define legacy bond markets. For that reason, a bigger wave of green bonds will up the pressure to improve standards and deepen confidence in a financial tool that could help firms and governments alike mobilize trillions of dollars of capital to fund climate-related transformation.

As green bond volumes rise, so too has scrutiny. In 2019, a top executive at Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund — the world’s biggest pension fund — expressed concerns over the space. He told the FT that, without greater volume and higher confidence in selection standards, the asset class risks becoming “a passing fad.” Such doubts could slow green bonds’ growth.

In the wider bond market, where tiny differentials in risk and yield can rapidly redirect huge capital flows, green bonds’ smaller market size, relative immaturity, and rising popularity can lead to unexpected outcomes. For instance, in 2019, Verizon issued $1 billion in green bonds that were oversubscribed eight fold. This led to a yield that was lower than the company’s conventional bonds.

Verizon’s successful listing, albeit anecdotal, suggests that green bonds may benefit from the sort of investor enthusiasm that has already lifted flows into green equity markets. Stock funds focused on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors have outperformed conventional investments over the past decade. To be sure, green bonds are subject to different market dynamics, yet both asset types could benefit from rising public sentiment.

Cultivating greener standards

Debt markets could see similar gains unfold in green bonds but are more reliant on an ecosystem of regulated ratings processes and investment standards. Hence, the need for more evolved rules around — and understanding of — what qualifies as “green” in a bond, and why it should thus merit different pricing and risk consideration.

Specialized green standards are emerging, and Europe is taking the lead. In 2019, the EU approved a set of guidelines (see the April 2020 EU technical report on sustainable finance here) better defining what counts as a sustainable investment. The new rules are “a clear signal to the financial markets that sustainable investment should become the new mainstream,” Bas Eickhout, a Green MEP told the FT.

These extend a foundation of green bond certifications and standards developed by private rating agencies. Issuers can get a green label if individual projects are in line with standards set out by the Green Bond Principles (GBPs) of the International Capital Market Association (ICMA).

To widen these criteria, Torsten Ehlers, Benoit Mojon, and Frank Packer at the Bank of International Settlements have endorsed an approach that would create firm-level ratings based on carbon intensity (carbon emissions relative to revenue) that would complement project-level bond assessments.

Their proposal addresses another concern in the nascent market, where green bonds are not yet generating measurable carbon reductions for their issuers: “green bond projects have not necessarily translated into comparatively low or falling carbon emissions at the firm level.”

When factored into project-based bond issuances, a firm-wide measure of carbon intensity could help would-be buyers and rating agencies better assess the overall climate impact of a green bond offering.

By this logic, automaker ABC Co. with an all-electric fleet would be rated somewhat higher on a green bond to fund a new EV plant compared with legacy car company XYZ Inc. issuing a similar bond to build its first EV factory. Such a system could reward ABC Co. with a lower cost of debt, thereby incenting long-term, systemic commitments to a low-carbon strategy.

Imperative innovation

This is a helpful reminder that, for all of the necessary minutiae around green bond ratings and standards, the higher goal is to fund investments that cut carbon.

Indeed, vital as energy innovations are –– from high-output wind turbines to low-cost batteries — to solving the climate crisis, markets face a related urgency to advance the technology behind the financial instruments needed to efficiently fund the decarbonization of energy systems. Accordingly, financial instruments that advance environmental sustainability are a growing priority for asset managers, corporate debt issuers, and governments alike.

Financial innovation sits at the heart of the 2015 Paris climate goals. The accord includes language committing signatories to make “finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development.”

By this logic, the imperative is clear. For green bonds to fulfill their promise — to drive decarbonization and lower climate risk — the finance industry must advance reliable rules to incent long-term investments that begin to deliver real reductions in carbon intensity.

Adam Aston is a senior writer, editor, and content consultant specializing in energy and climate. Connect with him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

—

Originally published at garp.com on 2020-10-02 at https://climate.garp.org/insight/growing-greener-bonds/

Open Air Collective

Open Air Weekly, Ep. 1 | Open Air Collective

In our very first episode Adam chats with OpenAir co-founder Chris Neidl (@neidl_c) about our inaugural policy advocacy efforts related to low carbon concrete in New York – where it came from, why it’s relevant to carbon removal and DACC, where things currently stand, and how its starting to spread to other places.

1:50 – Why OpenAir is involved in low carbon concrete

4:48 – Origins of New York State LECCLA legislation

6:23 – What the LECCLA bill would do as law

8:20 – CCU /Low carbon concrete and cement 101

13:00 – “The math in the sky” – why carbon removal and DACC are essential

18:44 – Getting to carbon negative (positive?) concrete

20:57 – Binging action: the open, informality of OpenAir’s concrete activism

24:40 – Joining the Collective

Links:

– The NYS Low Embodied Carbon Concrete Leadership Act (LECCLA) bill shorturl.at/wFQ67 – LECCLA explainer video: justification and policy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfmwM…

– LECCLA campaign site: www.openaircollective.cc/leccla (sign up and join!)

– “Can the concrete jungle sink carbon?” American Prospect piece about LECCLA and why it matters (Feb 2020). https://prospect.org/environment/can-…

– “Minimizing CO2 in Concrete Today” – Twenty-Something minutes with Zach Grasley [Video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9qcz…

GARP

Hotter, sooner: A landmark effort refines — and raises — the warming outlook | GARP

Improved climate model narrows prediction uncertainty and raises the odds of serious climate impacts from global warming

Risk managers and climate scientists share a fundamental challenge: How to identify, weigh, and process a dizzying mix of signals to better model a range of possible future outcomes. Accordingly, the complex mathematical methods underlying both disciplines tend to advance slowly. It’s rare to see big improvements in the precision of their forecasts.

Yet this past July, climate scientists achieved just such a leap, with the publication of an outlook — conducted under the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and published in the Review of Geophysics — for global warming that, for the first time, merges three disparate data sets and methodologies. Important as the technical improvements are, however, the conclusions have broader bearing for both climate science and risk managers.

The improved model predicts more warming in a world where CO2 levels hit twice their pre-industrial level, a threshold anticipated to hit mid-century, rather than closer to 2100. The findings thus boost the probability of serious climate impacts to energy operations, financial markets, human health, and the environment.

How much more warming by when?

To better understand the recalibration of this forecast, it’s helpful to revisit its predecessor. Since a landmark study published in 1979, scientists have expressed their outlook for temperature increase as a range — given a doubling of CO2 to pre-industrial levels — from a lower bound of 1.5°C to an upper limit of 4.5°C. From regulators to boardroom executives, planners have used this range as a reference for policy and business strategy over the past 40-odd years.

The new study narrows the bounds of this forecast range. It raises the lower limit of the estimate to 2.6°C while slightly reducing the upper bound, to 3.9°C by 2100. (See chart, via Science.)

“Narrowing the uncertainty is relevant not only for climate science but also for society that is responsible for solid decision making,” said Masahiro Watanabe, a professor at the University of Tokyo’s atmosphere and ocean research institute and one of the report’s authors, in an interview with The New York Times.

The study underscores a rising sense of certainty that the rate of warming is increasing. Today, global temperatures are already 1.2°C higher than their pre-industrial average.

The goal of the 1.5°C target was enshrined in the 2015 Paris climate accords, and has galvanized policy, business and public attention in part because it also represents what many scientists believe may be a critical threshold, a temperature gain beyond which the destabilizing effects of warming could accelerate sharply.

How is this study different?

For the first time, the new assessment unifies findings from three previously independent fields of climate research and analysis spanning vastly different eras.

The oldest numbers were taken from records of prehistoric temperatures preserved in sediment layers and tree rings. The next youngest come from direct measurement of temperatures taken since the start of the industrial revolution in the 1800s. And the most recent set of inputs was drawn from satellite measurements and computer models beginning in the 1980s.

On their own, none of these data sets could help refine the range of the temperature outlook. Simply synthesizing the disparate data sets was a challenge without precedent. The researchers were also able to enhance the precision of how feedback loops shape the outlook — for instance, how the loss of highly reflective white sea ice accelerates how quickly polar waters absorb heat. By merging and refining each vintage of findings, the meta-analysis delivered precision greater than the sum of its parts.

What’s more, the data proved to be more convergent than researchers anticipated. Co-author Gabriele Hegerl, a professor of climate system science at the University of Edinburgh, told The New York Times that she was surprised by the way the models converged. “We don’t expect these three lines of evidence to agree completely,” she said, but they did.

Data from the refined forecast will be used by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for its next major assessment in 2021 or 2022, Science magazine reports. From there, the data is likely to ripple into other national, academic, and private-sector models and inform projections for sea-level rise, economic damage, and other climate impacts.

Implications for risk managers

When offered equally probable good and bad outcomes, most folks tend to be too optimistic. Human nature is biased to think the good outcome is more likely; conversely, people tend to spend too little time thinking through the implications of the bad outcome. Put plainly, a lot of us tend to translate uncertainty as things should be okay.

Yet as risk professionals know all too well, uncertainty is always a double-edged sword. In the realm of climate change the risks vary from less severe and arriving more slowly to more intense and happening faster. To date, evidence is mounting that the outlook is tilted towards the bad, with disruptive changes happening faster and sooner than prior models anticipated. This has much to do with the complexity of the science behind modeling planet-sized physical systems. It also stems from science’s conservative culture: scientists tend to err on the side of caution when forecasting.

In the here and now, energy risk planners are already reckoning with climate phenomenon that are hitting energy markets and operations harder and faster than anticipated:

  • Wildfires are happening earlier, growing larger and impacting wider areas, in Australia, Russia, and the western U.S., damaging facilities and disrupting the extraction, processing, generation, and distribution of energy.
  • The intensity of hurricanes and tropical storms is rising at unseen speeds in the warming waters of the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, imperiling petrochemical plants.
  • Heat and heat-related illnesses kill more Americans each year than any other form of severe weather, according to the National Weather Service. Worldwide, similar patterns are likely, as heat stress raises physical and liability risks for workers and customers.

For business leaders, the challenge is growing more urgent. While the new scientific study shifts up the long-term temperature forecast, it remains in many ways a pure abstraction — an estimate off in the future.

And for risk managers, the challenge is to take these multi-decadal temperature forecasts and translate them into material risk recommendations. How will another degree — or more — of warming change business conditions? Over the next five years, the next decade, or by mid-century? Where and in what ways could the increase manifest?

Further reading: For a deeper look at the science behind the revised assessment, see Paul Voosen’s “After 40 years, researchers finally see Earth’s climate destiny more clearly” at sciencemag.org.

—

Originally published at garp.com on 2020-09-09, https://climate.garp.org/insight/hotter-sooner-a-landmark-effort-refines-and-raises-the-warming-outlook/

GreenBiz

This carbon challenge is bigger than cars, aviation and shipping combined | GreenBiz

You may not know it, but you rely on industrial heat every day. It helped make the bricks that hold up your home; the cement underfoot. It forged the steel and glass in your car, and it also cooked the aluminum, plastic and silicon in the very screen on which you may be reading these words.

Industrial heat is essential but largely invisible. To transform basic inputs into stuff we need, manufacturers constantly heat (and cool) minerals, ores and other raw materials to extreme temperatures. And for all the magic of this everyday alchemy, industrial heat poses a growing threat to the climate. The world’s kilns, reactors, chillers and furnaces are powered mostly by fossil fuels.

High-temperature industrial heat, over 932 degrees F, poses a particular challenge because that’s the point at which fuels beyond electricity become the mainstay. Overall, industrial thermal energy accounts for about a tenth of global emissions, according to a December study by Innovation for Cool Earth Forum (ICEF, a Japan-backed multinational expert group). At 10 percent, industrial heat ranks on par with the combined emissions of cars (about 6 percent), planes (about 2 percent) and ships (about 2 percent).

Yet while those transport sectors are advancing towards low-carbon solutions — with promising technologies cultivated by multilateral accords — industrial heat lacks any consensus plan and has a long to-do list to develop low-carbon alternatives.

The options include biodiesel, renewable electricity, renewable natural gas, solar thermal, geothermal, thermal storage and hydrogen. Yet as a best guess, if these were market-ready today, renewable thermal solutions would cost from two times to over 10 times more than fossil fuels, according to an October report from the Center for Global Energy Policy (CGEP) at Columbia University.

Making natural gas renewable

In time, decarbonizing industrial heat is likely to require an all-of-the above mix of solutions. But for now, renewable natural gas (RNG) may offer a fix soonest. Chemically similar to the fossil gas piped to our kitchens, RNG is instead generated from the breakdown of organic matter at landfills (the biggest current source), municipal sewage treatment plants, farm waste and similar sites. RNG also can be blended into regular natural gas pipelines with minimal modification, much the way that input from windmills can flow onto the same grid as power generated by a coal plant.

In fact, the wind example can help illustrate how early efforts to decarbonize industrial thermal energy are shaping up. In the 2000s, when wind and solar weren’t yet cost-competitive, market players pioneered ways to sell renewable energy indirectly. The solution was a set of standards and trading rules known as renewable energy credits, or RECs. The credits let a business in, say, Pittsburgh buy wind power generated in California, even before renewables were yet available on Pennsylvania’s grid.

What’s more, RECs allow a wind farm to sell both the power it generated and the renewable attributes of that power. As consumer and corporate demand for renewables grew, the value of the RECs rose, thereby incenting new wind and solar projects. Over time, RECs let companies source the renewable energy they needed, even when it wasn’t available locally, which made it easier for companies and states to slowly boost their targets for renewables.

Certifying renewable thermal solutions

Fast forward to 2020, and a team of collaborators is hoping to adapt learnings pioneered with RECs to nurture a nascent market for zero-carbon fuels, such as RNG, that buyers including L’Oréal USA and the University of California System are already using to generate renewable thermal energy.

Today, RNG is held back in part by a Catch-22 financial trap. Costs add up quickly: equipment to collect biogas (the unprocessed methane-rich vapor given off by waste); upgrade the gas to pipeline quality; and connect to existing gas pipelines.

Capital needs for smaller landfill projects run from $5 million to $25 million. Larger projects — such as agriculture and wastewater plants — can hit $100 million, according to Jade Patterson, BloombergNEF’s analyst covering RNG. On average, each RNG project requires $17 million of capital investment, based on data from the RNG Coalition.

At that price, most farms or town dumps can’t afford to develop biogas collection on their own. “An effective certification program could give lenders the confidence to fund new installations,” Patterson said. And if farms see reliable demand for their RNG, more are likely to make the investment: supply grows; prices fall; and the Catch-22 can be broken.


“Companies are trying to decarbonize the heat piece of their Scope 1 carbon footprint,” explained Blaine Collison, an Environmental Protection Agency veteran and senior vice president at David Gardiner and Associates, a co-convener – along with the World Wildlife Fund and the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions – of the Washington, D.C.-based Renewable Thermal Collaborative. “Creating renewable thermal attributes and trading instruments is critical to enable companies to act, to show the actions they’re taking and to demonstrate the reductions they’re achieving.”

The effort to extend a REC model to renewable thermal energy is being co-led by the Center for Resource Solutions (CRS), a San Francisco based non-governmental organization that’s been advancing sustainable energy via policy and market-based innovations since 1997.

The first step? CRS is building a set of rules that meet the highest environmental standards and ensure that when customers buy green fuel, such as RNG, they can verify its lower carbon intensity, said Rachael Terada, CRS’ director of technical projects, in a recent webinar. 

Now in its first draft, CRS’ Green-e certified fuel certificate standard is focusing initially on RNG, already being produced and sold on a small scale across North America. The standard can be extended to other renewable fuels in time. (Watch out for more news in this space at CRS’ Renewable Energy Markets 2020, convening online Sept. 21-24.)

Covering the U.S. and Canada, CRS’s Green-e certification program will include rules for registries such that each dekatherm (equal to 1 million British thermal units) is unique and cannot be double-counted, Terada said.

There’s already demand from industry to buy more RNG, said Benjamin Gerber, chief executive of Minneapolis-based M-RETS (formerly Midwest Renewable Energy Tracking System), which is working to develop a registry to track RNG certificates. 

“Having clear standards for renewable thermal products along with robust trading platforms will help drive greenhouse gas reductions,” Collison said. “We know that there’s a growing corporate need for these solutions.”

Thermal energy, in the long run

CRS’ Green-e initiative has the potential to accelerate investment in renewable fuels, and thereby open up ways to decarbonize industrial energy markets.

Before then, companies can take some basic first steps, such as auditing their thermal energy use. “A lot of organizations simply haven’t done the work to understand how they’re heating and cooling their operations,” said Meredith Annex, who heads BloombergNEF’s heating decarbonization research team.

The urgency is growing. As industrialization accelerates in China, India and other emerging markets, global demand for industrial heat has grown by 50 percent since 2000, estimates BloombergNEF, and without lower carbon options, will continue to rise. 

Without a fix, global climate goals may not be achievable. “Decarbonizing industrial heat production will be essential to meeting the Paris Agreement goals,” notes David Sandalow, a former Obama administration official and lead author of ICEP’s roadmap to decarbonize industrial heat. 

Published 2020-08-13 https://www.greenbiz.com/article/carbon-challenge-bigger-cars-aviation-and-shipping-combined

T Brand Studio

How T Brand Studio Created a Culture of Content Innovation | IBM Industries Blog

When The New York Times first debuted T Brand Studio, its branded content unit, in 2014, branded content didn’t exactly have the best reputation in the industry. Other publishers generating branded content at the time had a tendency to confuse readers by failing to clearly differentiate between content from the newsroom and content from advertisers. Some would further muddy the waters by using newsroom editors and writers to create that content.

Newsroom leadership was initially “very anxious” about the new unit, said T Brand Vice President and Executive Editorial Director Adam Aston. But the need to create a new revenue stream in the organization was clear. The Times had to move from a print sales-based ad model to a digital-first model, and they had to get it right.

“We were watching our print advertising on a linear straight path down, which is where most publishers up to that point were getting most of their revenue and profit. That undermined the economics of subsidizing a news operation. And if you’re cutting back on getting news it’s a vicious cycle. For many of our peers it was a death cycle,” Aston said.

The studio started small, with just a handful of employees producing content hosted on the New York Times website. But it soon proved its mettle with the release of “Women Inmates: Why The Male Model Doesn’t Work,” a beautiful interactive piece for Netflix to promote the second season of “Orange Is the New Black.” This, clearly, was not branded content as usual.Women in Prison, Part 1 | Presented by Netflix

Four years later, T Brand Studio has grown 25-fold, employing more than 100 people across offices in New York, London, Paris and Hong Kong. In 2016, it acquired HelloSociety, an influencer marketing agency, and FakeLove, a Brooklyn-based experiential agency. (IBM’s “Outthink Hidden” campaign was T Brand’s first project with the agency.)

And it has expanded beyond producing native branded content to providing a whole suite of creative services for companies on their own platforms. T Brand Studio is not simply an in-house creative unit, it’s an agency—and it’s successful, growing both production and media revenue by double digits every year.

If you’re looking for a study in how to disrupt your own organization, look no further than T Brand Studio.

“Even when sitting on an incredible foundation of writing, reputation, and loyal customers, change isn’t easy,” Aston said. “The Studio’s success is part of a much larger digital transformation across the Times’ newsroom and business operations that’s accelerated in the past five years.”

A crucial ingredient in T Brand’s success has been its mix of personnel. While similar content organizations essentially hired the usual cast of characters one might find at a creative agency, Aston said, T Brand looked for content makers who were “a little bit different than your standard marketing copywriter creative type.” In hiring, he said, the intent was to “borrow the best of the Times journalism and fuse it with the kind of goals brands would be pursuing.”

“That’s a rule of thumb for all business—you’ve got to master the best of disciplines and bring them together in ways that haven’t been done before. Getting the chemistry right can be hard and getting the casting right can take time,” Aston said.

Another crucial differentiator for T Brand has been its use of new technology, including VR, AR and 360 video. But while the studio has been an early adopter—and in some cases, a first adopter—of those technologies at the Times, Aston said it’s just as important to know when not to use a new technology as it is to know when to use it. VR, AR, and 360 video are incredible storytelling tools, he said, but they’re not right for every project.

“You don’t want to add gratuitous technology to something just because it’s neat,” Aston said.

Once a source of anxiety within its organization, T Brand is now a source of inspiration as it drives innovation within the Times while contributing to a viable new business model. As T Brand gears up to launch its 400th paid post this quarter, it’s intent on carrying that spirit of innovation into the future.

“The more we experiment and the more it’s successful, the more comfortable the Times has gotten at experimenting,” Aston said. “The organization is more confident knowing, ‘Hey you can try this. It may be complicated, it may be hard, it might not always be a home run, but you have to experiment,’” Aston said.

See the original post here: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/industries/t-brand-studio-created-culture-reinvention/

T Brand Studio

T Brand partners

Accenture, Activia, Adobe, ADT, Aetna, Aetna, AIG, Airbnb, Alitalia, Amazon, Amex, Amex, Amore Pacific, API, Bancomer, Bank of America, Bank of the West, Belvedere Vodka, Ben & Jerry’s, Blackrock, Bleeker Street, BMW, BNP Paribas, BNY Mellon, Bottega Veneta, Brighthouse Financial, Bulgari, Business France, CA Tech, Cadillac, Canon, Capital One, Cartier, Cathay Pacific, Chanel, Charles Schwab, Chaumet, Chevron, Chobani, Cisco, Citi, Citigold, Cleveland Clinic, Club Med, Cocovia, Cole Haan, Columbia Business School, Con Ed, Costa Rica, Credit Suisse, Crown Royal, CTCA, Dell, Delta, Destination Canada, Diageo: Johnny Walker, Diane Von Furstenberg, Discover, Docusign, Embassy of Japan, Emirates, Enterprise Florida, Ernst & Young, Esurance, Exxon, Fairlife, Fairmont, Farmers Insurance, Fidelity, Fidelity Retirement, Florida Keys, Focus Features, Fontainebleau, Ford, Franklin Templeton, Gates Foundation, GE, Geico, Girls’ Lounge, Glenmorangie, GMCVB, Goldman Sachs, Google, Google Waze, Grey Goose, Gucci, Guinness, Hennessy, Herradura, History Channel, Holiday Inn, Home Depot, Hong Kong, HP, HPE, HSBC, Huawei, Iberostar, IBM, Invisalign, J&J, Janssen, Juniper, KIA, Land Rover, Lincoln, Longines, Macallan, Mass Mutual, MasterCard, Max Mara, Mercedes Benz, Merrill Lynch, Method, Metlife, MetLife, Mexico Tourism, MilkPEP, Minh Long, Moet, MTV, Muzo, NAR National Assn of Realtors, NCAA, Nest, Nestle Waters, Netflix, NetJets, Nike, Nordstrom, Northern Trust, Northwest Univ. Kellogg School of Business, Norton, NRG, Nuclear Matters, OnePlus, Oppenheimer, OWN, P&G, Pacific Life, Park Hyatt, Park West Gallery, PC Hub, Perrier Jouet, Peru, Pfizer, Philips, Prada, Prego, Prodigy Network, Pure Storage, Purina, Real is a Diamond, Reuters, Ritz Carlton, Royal Caribbean, Salesforce, Shell, Shire, Slack, SoFi, Sotheby’s, Spotify, Sprint, Stanford, Starbucks, Starz, Statoil, Stella Artois, Switzerland Tourism, Synchrony, Tanium, TCS Marathon, TD Ameritrade, Texture, Thai Airways, Thailand Elite, The New School, TIAA, Tiffany, Titos, TNT, Tomorrow Sleep, Toyota, Tropicana, Tylenol, U.S. Virgin Islands, UBS, UC Davis, United Airlines, University of Minnesota, University of Phoenix, Vacheron, Vanguard, Veritas, Verizon, Veuve Clicquot, Visit Norway, Volvo, Voya, Walmart, WEAR, Weinstein Co., Wells Fargo, Wendy’s, Western Digital, Zegna.

Corporate Knights

HOW Blue-Zone Technologies Cuts THE CLIMATE TOLL OF Anesthesia | Corporate Knights

Anesthesia is a medical miracle, but it’s costly and poses a surprising threat to the climate

gaseous anesthesia

Operating rooms are sites of some of our most advanced health technologies, where bodies are healed and lives often saved. Yet for the climate, operating rooms are surprisingly unhealthful.

The culprit: gaseous anesthesia. When anesthetized, patients only absorb about 5 per cent of an administered dosage. The leftovers – roughly 95 per cent of the original volatile anesthetic – are routinely vented to the outside world where they act as greenhouse gases thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide.

“It’s a risk to the environment, and a terrible waste of money,” says Dusanka Filipovic, who for 10 years has been building a business to fix this twin-barreled problem. The Toronto-based firm she founded, Blue-Zone Technologies, is poised to begin large-scale commercial implementation of its Deltasorb technology, which captures and recycles anesthesia emissions.

When retrofitted onto the exhaust line of a conventional anesthetic gas system, the filter recaptures and absorbs the scavenged gases. In roughly 300 pilot sites in hospitals across Ontario, the service is already helping the planet by preventing these emissions from adding to our GHG problem.

And later this year, Blue-Zone will begin to help hospitals’ bottom lines as well, by using the captured excess gases as a raw material to make and sell a generic, lower-cost supply of anesthetics, says Filipovic.

Inhaled anesthesia gases – the most common are desflurane, isoflurane and sevoflurane – are a miracle of modern medicine. They evolved from and replaced ether, the first form of inhaled anesthesia pioneered in the 1800s. Yet ether was so dangerous, it was a common cause of death during surgery.

Modern anesthesia gases, by comparison, have largely eliminated those risks, explains Stephen Brown, corporate chief of anesthesia with William Osler Health System, which operates two hospitals in Ontario.

“They allow a far finer degree of control,” he adds, “lowering patient risk during surgery. And they cut the side effects and hangover afterwards,” says Brown, who has overseen the installation of Deltasorb systems in three dozen operating rooms.

Though healthier for humans, modern anesthesia is making the planet sick.

Desflurane, the most widely used anesthesia, has global warming effects some 3,700 times greater than CO2. The gas inhaled typically includes a mix of similar agents, and is delivered via a flow of a mix of oxygen and nitrous oxide, which is also a potent GHG.

For every hour of surgery, the effects of these gases add up to the equivalent of hundreds of miles of driving. Taken together, worldwide emissions of inhalation anesthetics have a climate impact on par with a single coal-fired power plant, or more than 1 million passenger cars, according to a 2010 study in the British Journal of Anaesthesia.

Blue-Zone is already helping to tug that toll down thanks to its bread-loaf sized canisters. Retrofitted onto the exhaust pipes of anesthesia systems, the reusable canisters are filled with a proprietary material that absorbs the volatile anesthesia gases exhausted by the anesthetic system. Blue-Zone technicians routinely pick them up from the hospitals and replace them with refills.

The fee? About $150 per month. At less than $5 per day, that’s “not a significant cost barrier,” says Brown. Hospitals receive a monthly report on the amount of gas recaptured and what that works out to in terms of CO2-equivalent GHG emissions.

Returned to Blue-Zone’s facility in Concord, Ontario, the filter packs are processed to recover accumulated anesthesia, which is then processed into generic anesthetic agents and packaged for resale.

Filipovic is excited by the opportunity to offer a lower cost alternative for gaseous anesthesia, for which the market is highly concentrated. Worldwide, just two factories – in Japan and Puerto Rico – produce these life-saving gases, which makes them not only costly but vulnerable to supply disruption.

As yet, however, there are no regulations in Canada or other major countries forcing hospitals to curb anesthesia emissions.

~

  • View a PDF of the original article, here: Blue-Zone.
  • Photo courtesy of the NATO International Security Assistance Force.
T Brand Studio

The 60-Second Interview: Adam Aston for The New York Times’s T Brand Studio | Politico

By CAPITAL STAFF — 06/27/2014

CAPITAL: Can you walk us through the process of how a paid post gets made? Do you generally approach companies with post ideas, or is it the other way around?

ASTON: It’s a collaborative, iterative process. After clients come to us with an opportunity and specific goals, the team brainstorms and returns with concepts, which we then evolve further along with the client. For a successful execution like Netflix’s Paid Post for “Orange is the New Black,” trust and cooperation are key catalysts.

CAPITAL: The “Orange is the New Black” ad made waves in media circles. Digiday called it “The Snowfall of Native Ads.” Were you surprised by the reaction? Has that success opened up new business opportunities?

ASTON: We’re a young studio, with a lot of energy, talent and ambition. “Orange is the New Black” was the first project on which we were able to fire-up all of our talents in parallel — journalism, video, design and storytelling. We were hoping it would raise the bar, and it did so. Nothing illustrates the potential of a Paid Post like a real-world example like this, so we’ve seen some increased interest from new potential projects.

CAPITAL: Referring to the Netflix ad, Times media columnist David Carr wrote, “All brand-sponsored journalism does not suck.” Do you find yourself trying to challenge that perception on a regular basis? Why do you think people seem to have lower expectations for brand-sponsored content?

ASTON: Like David, we recognize that this kind of content faces real headwinds. Media watchers are rightly concerned that this content could potentially confuse readers. That’s why The New York Times has labored to demark T Brand Studio’s work from newsroom content. That said, marketer content can be just as valuable as content coming from a newsroom. All content — whether news or advertising — works best when it’s of a high quality.

CAPITAL: A lot of your editors and contributors seem to have journalism backgrounds. Is that something you look for? Is there a big difference between writing a news story and writing a paid post?

ASTON: Journalistic sensibilities and experience are vital to execute high quality content, so when were were staffing up we were definitely looking for experienced journalists to join our team. Writing a news story and writing a piece of sponsored content both require solid reporting and writing skills, as well as a focus on facts.

CAPITAL: There’s obviously been a lot of discussion about how to integrate native advertising; specifically, about how it should be differentiated from news content. Do you think it’s important for paid content to be clearly labeled as such? And do you think there’s a reader appetite for well-written paid posts?

ASTON: Sponsored content is not about tricking your readers, it’s about adding value to the conversation. As I mentioned, we want to avoid confusing readers at all costs. In turn, we want to provide them with thought-provoking, engaging content in the form of infographics, video, images and of course, written narrative. Examples like the success of Netflix’s Paid Post show that readers do welcome well-written sponsored content that offer a fresh perspective on interesting topics. Readers respond enthusiastically when compelling, clearly-labeled content enriches their interest in a topic related to the brand.

View the original here: https://www.politico.com/media/story/2014/06/the-60-second-interview-adam-aston-editorial-director-for-the-new-york-times-t-brand-studio-002456

Writer, editor, content advisor, creative leader – energy, climate | Chief storyteller at RMI | Co-founder of T Brand at The New York Times