A few weeks ago, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a lengthy, and rather convincing piece, about why America needs to go green. His central argument is quite simple, really: Going green is the only way to discontinue our relationship with oil-rich foreign enemies that may harbor terrorists, and also to avoid certain disaster resulting from climate change. But even with these seemingly air tight reasons, he argues that for green to be adopted on a scale large enough to matter, there have to be financial reasons to do so. Well...duh, right? So how do we do it?
One of Friedman’s solutions is a national carbon tax, the effectiveness of which reasonable minds can, and certainly do, disagree. Another is simply to be more efficient in the use of energy. Here’s one of Friedman’s examples: An American locomotive manufacturer makes reliable and uber-efficient products. Even though they’re 30 percent more expensive initially than similar products made in China, the company has a trade surplus to China because of the cheaper life-cycle cost of the more efficient locomotives. Because its economy is still in the middle stages of development, no one in China is doing green for the sake of green quite yet. But because the products are more efficient, they also emit fewer greenhouse gases and nitrogen oxides, essentially making them a greener product than a traditional locomotive. Isn’t it amazing how often quality and environmental responsibility go hand-in-hand, even if the connection isn’t explicitly made?
While Friedman’s piece was still fresh in my head, I had a conversation with a Boise, Idaho-based developer named Gary Christensen. Christensen headed a team that built a LEED Platinum-certified speculative office building in downtown Boise. In a DVD documentary about the process of building the building titled “Green is the Color of Money,” Christensen makes the point several times that he is a capitalist, first and foremost. But, he says, if you could build a high-quality building for the same cost as a traditional, and be environmentally responsible, why wouldn’t you? And doing is so is relatively simple. It’s just a matter of figuring out the right combinations of technologies and integrating them so that the whole is greener than the sum of the parts.
During our conversation, Christensen told me that other developers in Boise are wondering how he made any money, because of the misperception that green is more expensive or not “capitalistically viable.” However, as he explained, not only is his building more valuable because of lower operating costs, but also he’s seen a much faster lease-up than other office buildings in Boise, which he says are struggling with vacancy rates. My favorite quote from the interview was: “If you’re not saving at least 50 percent on energy, than you’re not trying.”
Christensen says he was heavily influenced by a book called Natural Capitalism. The book is essentially about all the things Friedman discusses in his piece – merging economic feasibility with care for the environment. In other words, the goal is to discover how to make what’s good for the environment a bottom-line booster as well - something both Christensen, in practice, and Friedman, in theory, seem to have figured out. Whether it’s efficient locomotives or efficient buildings, the intersection of capitalism and environmentalism – until now, rather unlikely bedfellows - is almost certainly what will be the “magic key” for widespread adoption of green.