Australia’s inaugural cap-and-trade legislation is causing the nation’s political climate to heat up so much that it has now become the deciding factor between whether or not the country will see an early election this year.

The country’s opposition leader, Malcolm Turnbull, has made it clear that his coalition will vote against the nation’s first-ever climate change legislation next month, unless the bill is amended from its current form. Known as the Carbon Reduction Pollution Scheme (CRPS), the bill was originally presented to the upper house Senate in June, 2009. The bill is slated for a second vote on August 13^th and according to Australia’s laws, if the bill does not pass on it’s second time through, the Australian Labor government will have reason to call for a snap election.

Originally proposed by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Labor government, the bill requires an extra seven votes to pass through the upper house, which is controlled by opposition parties. It was hoped that Rudd would be able to pass the legislation through the Senate before the American Clean Energy and Security Act, and before the UN climate talks in Copenhagen. Turnbull has offered the support of his opposition coalition if the bill is amended to provide more economic support to power generators who leverage coal as a fuel source to generate roughly 80% of the country’s electricity. Additionally, Turnbull is seeking to exclude the agricultural sector from the trading scheme. Those who oppose the amendments proposed by Turnbull argue that if accepted, the bill will do little to affect the country’s overall greenhouse gas emissions.

The legislation contains 11 bills that have become highly controversial in the country’s political arena as politicians and industry leaders debate the impacts that the laws may have on the economic health of the nation. As it now stands, the bill will regulate 1,000 of Australia’s largest companies and will price carbon initially at $5 (USD) per ton, giving businesses a financial incentive to reduce their emissions over time. Opponents of the bill claim that the economic impacts will be too great and that the nation’s industries won’t be able to compete with foreign nations who have either have less stringent climate change laws or, none at all.

Although the opposition is largely against the proposed cap and trade scheme, they have a vested interest in passing the bill because if they don’t, they are fairly certain that Rudd will call for the early election which polls project he can easily win. Instead, many opposition leaders are interested in passing the bill now and holding out for the previously scheduled election in late 2010, when they will have a better shot at winning.

Despite Turnbull’s admonitions that he controls the votes of the opposition, the Labor party only needs seven more votes to pass the bill. Unfortunately, what it might come down to is that Australia’s political leaders may vote on their nation’s first ever carbon trading scheme not based on the scientific and economic merits of the legislation but more so, out of their personal interests in political survival.

As the U.S. auto manufacturing industry slows to a halt, the evidence seems clear that car-centered transportation models are economically and environmentally unsustainable systems. However, the downfall of the traditional car industry presents us with exciting opportunities to re-envision cost effective transportation systems that move people on-time and provide economic growth opportunities while also minimizing negative impacts on Earth’s limited natural resource base.

In order to realize the exciting new opportunities that lay ahead, what we need most are entrepreneurs and policy makers who are willing to create an innovative and compelling vision for alternative modes of transportation. Most importantly, what we need is a leader that can engage the public in being a part of creating and supporting a new way forward.

There is a worldwide need to stabilize global carbon dioxide emissions, prepare for decreased oil production, alleviate traffic congestion and reduce air pollution. The truth is, we don’t have to look very far for transportation systems that accomplish all of these goals. A potential leader to look towards is Japan and the country’s high-speed bullet trains that travel up to 190 miles per hour, carrying almost one million people each day. As a pioneer in this arena, Japan’s high-speed rail network spans over 1, 350 miles, linking the nation’s major cities with trains that depart roughly every three minutes.

Indicators for progress on this issue in the United States include California’s 2008 passage of Proposition 1A which will provide a statewide high speed passenger train system and President Obama’s vision for a national high-speed rail system in the U.S. Ultimately, an impactful solution will require unprecedented partnerships between land use and transportation planners who have the knowledge and tools required to construct housing centers that are located within proximity to centers of employment and adequate transportation routes.

It will be some time before these types of partnerships are realized and the resulting solutions become available to passengers. In the meantime, the best solutions happen to be our own two feet.

When Gavin Newsom announced last week that the city’s new sustainable food policy calls for more urban land to be used to grow food, many residents wondered where the additional land would come from. According to Garden Fare, a new and growing business in the Bay Area, most residents don’t need to look any farther than their own front and backyards.

As more and more companies emerge with offerings of urban agriculture services, their emphasis is often largely placed on the conversion of abandoned lots and unused parking areas. What makes a company like Garden Fare unique is that they focus on converting existing ornamental lawns into edible gardens that provide ample amounts of healthy, local produce. In addition to providing easy access to healthy food, Garden Fare founder Patrick Rodysill also highlights the fact that residents see a greater return on their investments in lawn care when those lawns are being used to grow edible foods versus the more typical, non-edible plants.

Currently, the majority of Garden Fare’s customers are middle class homeowners in the Oakland area. The business model that Garden Fare is built upon incorporates a process that begins with an initial consultation, followed up by a garden design, implementation of the design and in most cases, long-term maintenance and care of the garden. In fact, Garden Fare indicates that roughly 90% of their customer base is looking for more than just a pretty garden they can eat; they’re also looking for someone to care for that garden. Although the company philosophy is based on the belief that people should be empowered and educated enough to grow their own food, the company also believes in empowering communities through providing needed gardening services that most residents simply don’t have the time for.

Drawn in by cost savings in lawn maintenance fees and increases in property values, most customers are staying on board because they’re drawn to the easy access that an edible garden provides to healthy produce that is either not available from a local grocer or, is not available at cost-effective prices. Although most customers are homeowners, renters are also coming on board by signing up to have large container boxes of produce installed in their yards. That way, when the renter leaves, they take their investment in garden infrastructure with them.

The details of Newsom’s new food policy are still unclear but the company leaders remain hopeful that Newsom’s announcement may signal a shift towards city-based tax incentives for converting decorative lawns into edible lawns. In nearby regions such as Marin County, residents are taking advantage of subsidies on materials such as drip irrigation supplies, which greatly reduces the upfront capital costs of investing in an urban garden. Hopefully, the same will be true for San Francisco and so far, Newsom’s commitment to providing city residents with secure access to high nutrition produce has received citywide support thus far.

Garden Fare intends to grow the business slowly with an incremental approach to acquiring new customers and servicing new regions. Like any good company, they’re looking for ways to optimize their operations with strategies such as stadard garden layouts and contents so that the same garden may be replicable across a number of yards.

However, with Rodysill and his staff, it’s not just about growing the business for the sake of revenue. According to Rodysill, growing Garden Fare means that more urban residents are being better fed, at lower prices and that more green jobs are becoming available to urban youth.

Whether or not sustained growth is possible given the current economy, one thing is clear: Garden Fare plans to weather the storm, one yard at a time.

In 2008, Texas Instruments (TI) saved $5.1 million through reducing energy use by 5% and water consumption by over 7%. As a result, TI reduced its worldwide carbon footprint to 2.07 million metric tons of CO2, which represents a 2.8% reduction in the company’s worldwide carbon footprint.

The company’s 2008 Corporate Social Responsibility Report outlines the 159 distinct initiatives that were undertaken to realize the company-wide savings. Entitled, “Building a Better Future,” the new report organizes the company’s environmental performance into eight categories including air quality, climate change, energy use, alternative transportation, water use, materials usage & recycling, sustainable site policies and principles.

However, the most captivating elements of the report are the environmental performance highlights.

2008 indicators of success at Texas instruments include but are not limited to:
• Reduced total energy use by 5% from 2007.
• Reduced total water use by 7.3%.
• Recycled 1.4 billion U.S. gallons of water (16% of the company’s global water use).
• Recycled 88% of non-industrial waste.
• Recycled 91% of total waste.
• Constructed the first LEED Silver certified building in the Philippines.
• Set a goal of being LEED certified at all of their major existing buildings globally by 2011.

Of the 159 initiatives that TI embarked upon to accomplish these savings, the key projects include:
• A well-water cooling system in Germany, which leverages an underground aquifer to balance the site’s heating and cooling system. This system alone saved TI roughly $1 million in energy savings and reductions in annual water consumption by nearly 33 million gallons.
• Reusing 228 million gallons of water at a North Texas facility to scrub manufacturing exhaust enabled a savings of $937,000.
• In some instances, TI cut energy costs in half through targeting energy-intensive chillers and vacuum pumps and replacing the targeted system components with more efficient machinery and parts.
• TI avoided a 14% rise in employee commuting-related CO2 emissions through increasing the use of employee carpooling systems, mass transit and onsite shuttles.

Despite these accomplishments, the company still faces challenges in the years to come. The latest report identifies the challenges ahead, which include increased operating costs from greater regulatory assessments. Specifically, the company is concerned that increased regulations may result in a market in which necessary replacement materials for semiconductor manufacturing either won’t be available at cost-effective prices or, the materials won’t be available at all.

TI is currently exploring renewable energy sources and efficiency strategies as a means of determining a clear path to remaining profitable in a low-carbon economy. Given the company’s ability to achieve such significant savings in 2008 is a clear indicator that despite whatever challenges may lie ahead, the company is well-poised to create innovative and cost-effective solutions to maintaining it’s status as an industry leader while also reducing the environmental impact of doing business.

The field of competitors within the emerging field of energy management software now includes Microsoft. Earlier this week Microsoft launched Hohm, a home energy management application that delivers appliance specific energy consumption data to users through a web interface. The intention behind Hohm is to enable consumers to gauge their electricity usage and determine strategies for reducing consumption.

Microsoft’s entrance into the field comes only one month after Google released similar software, known as PowerMeter. Hohm is being launched with four utility partners including Puget Sound Energy, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, Seattle City Light and Xcel Energy. At this time, it’s unclear as to whether or not Microsoft intends to deliver a similar offering for enterprise customers. What is certain is that Microsoft believes in the pivotal role that technology will play in addressing energy issues.

Detailed, fine-grain tracking capabilities of Hohm will only be available to residential customers who have opted into the program with Microsoft’s initial four utility partners. However, other U.S. consumers can use Hohm to gauge the efficiency of their homes and appliances. With a specific emphasis on heaters, air conditioners and lighting, the data behind the software was licensed from the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and the Department of Energy. Leveraging this data, users will also be able to estimate the overall CO2 emissions associated with their energy usage. To accomplish this, the Hohm backend examines the makeup of generation sources that service the customer’s region.

A key feature of the new offering is that in addition to delivering near-real time usage information, it also provides users with actionable strategies and recommendations for adjusting energy practices that save money and reduce environmental impacts.

Microsoft intends to expand the reach of this new application and is pursuing partnerships with a half dozen other utilities that they expect to sign on by the end of 2009. Although most utilities are just beginning their implementation of smart meters, there’s already a heated competition among companies to be the leading providers of the interface that communicates the energy usage data.

Hohm, however, has had a rocky start. Beta users who signed up this week have complained about being unable to log into the service and that they’re receiving internal server error messages. Microsoft is aware of the issues and is working on fixing problems caused by issues ranging from postal code discrepancies to incompatibilities among browser languages. Other users have complained that some of the manual data entry required is too laborious and that what’s really needed is a more automated system for capturing historical data.

Perhaps Microsoft was not quite ready to launch Hohm and, perhaps, they launched early as an attempt to keep pace with Google. Either way, consumers can rest assured that Microsoft will fix the known problems and that the evolution of home energy management software is now another arena in which Microsoft and Google’s fierce competition will drive innovation.

On Wednesday of this week, the G8 leaders failed to pass unanimously a climate bill to mandate a 50% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050. The group’s failure to agree is further evidence that international agreements on a global climate change policy are stalling. The cause of the gridlock stems from disagreements among national leaders on primarily two fronts: efficacy and equity. History plays a part as well, as exemplified by Obama’s struggle to overcome the legacy of the Bush administration’s inaction on the climate issue.

As progress towards an international agreement stalls, climate change policy critics are gaining a stronger voice in the debate over the issue. In fact, an international group of academics are now encouraging world leaders to simply abandon their current climate change policies. Instead, the authors advocate for the G8 nations and developing countries to emphasize improvements in energy efficiency and to deploy low-carbon technologies.

The report, entitled, “How to Get Climate Policy back on Course” was published on July 7th as a joint publication from the London School of Economics and the University of Oxford. Ultimately, the report claims that there is evidence that carbon trading schemes such as those executed by Kyoto and proposed by the American Clean Energy and Security Act “have no meaningful effect whatsoever.” Instead, the authors claim that effective policies should be based on strategies that have proven to work in the past and that policies should not be based on untested systems that require the creation of bureaucratic systems for oversight.

While some environmentalists have praised the report for acknowledging a lack of urgency in the political arena’s response to climate change, others have harshly criticized the report, claiming that shifting the focus of current climate negotiations would slow down the negotiation process even further.

Advocates for policy-driven improvements in energy efficiency and low-carbon technologies typically look to Japan as evidence of how emissions reductions can be accomplished without complex trading regimes. Japan’s energy policy model, known as “Mamizu” serves as a model for an approach that is based on goals that can clearly be accomplished without relying on indirect initiatives such as trading schemes.

An international team of researchers led by Princeton academics is proposing another alternative approach, which is considered to be a direct strategy to reduce emissions. The focus of this approach moves away from the traditional emphasis on national emissions and instead, targets a global class of roughly one billion individuals who they claim are responsible for a vast portion of the world’s carbon emissions. This strategy is derived as a means of avoiding the disagreements among nations as to what nation-based targets are fair and effectual.

Either way, a catalyst is needed to spark forward progress on the talks leading up to the Copenhagen climate conference. As mentioned earlier, one cause of the current gridlock is the issue of equity. Governments are unwilling to agree to ambitious reductions targets because it could mean high costs to their taxpayers and because leaders are afraid of losing market advantages to countries with weaker reductions targets. Typically, countries with weaker targets would be developing economies that don’t have the financial strength to invest in clean technologies to the extent that industrialized nations are able to.

As a result, we now have a political conversation where industrialized nations are seeking equitable reductions targets across all nations as a means of protecting their competitive advantages. Conversely, developing nations argue that they should have weaker targets because per capita, they contribute less GHG emissions and because the industrialized nations have been polluting carbon for longer periods of time. As a result, equity is at the heart of the stalled progress.

Debate over the efficacy of proposed targets is also a central factor in the mired talks as nations differ on what reductions levels will make a meaningful difference in mitigating human-induced climate change.