Our inaugural EDFix module has focused on the Commons, with calls about governing the Commons, sharing green patents, bottom-up problem solving of global problems, life cycle cost analysis and most recently a dive into sharing data among health care institutions. Our guests have been stellar.

Shortly we'll shift to a module about the green opportunities in vehicle fleets, but before we do, let's see what insights about our interactions with the Commons we might apply to organizational strategy.

Our guest for this next call, Silke Helfrich, brings deep insights about the Commons from a German perspective. She first got our attention with this Commons Manifesto and a simpler post on Shareable.net. We'll focus this call on Silke's article "The commons as a common paradigm for social movements and beyond" and discuss why and how the concept of the Commons might matter to sustainable business.

Please join us on Monday, March 22, 2010 at noon ET (9am PT) for the call:

• Phone number: +1 (213) 289-0500
• Code: 267-6815

Get Updates about EDFix Conference Calls

If you'd like to get announcements about upcoming EDFix conference calls and the results with podcast releases, please sign-up here:

China's growing economic power is a growing concern for many Americans. Can the U.S. continue to compete with China in the global marketplace?

In a new piece for Reuters, EDF President Fred Krupp says "yes" — through the power of comprehensive climate and energy legislation.

Fred talks about the new "tripartisan" effort to pass a climate and clean energy bill in the U.S. Senate.

He also talks about how that effort is our best hope to beat China in the world's clean energy markets — and win the jobs those markets create:

Along with Sens. Graham, Kerry, and Lieberman, I believe we can match the scale of China’s centralized industrial policy by fully deploying the engine of American prosperity: our marketplace. It is the only tool we have with the scale and capital to compete with China. If the U.S. puts a limit on carbon pollution, we will send a clear signal to the marketplace that will unleash a massive wave of private investment in low-carbon energy sources and technologies like carbon capture and storage that would allow us to compete with the Chinese. Only when American policy creates a profit motive for investors, inventors and entrepreneurs, will we have a chance to win the race.

You can read the full piece here.

This content is cross-posted on Climate411 and written by Sharyn Stein.

An important objective of Environmental Defense Fund's Innovation Exchange is to connect with other people who work at the nexus of business and sustainability and make the whole network more effective. We believe networking and shared learning are central to the rapid innovation needed to dramatically improve sustainability in business. We want to know who you are, what you are doing and to give you the opportunity to know what we are doing and learning.

Therefore, we are maintaining a number of networking channels to help us find each other as well as communications channels to help us inform each other. We hope you'll join in by connecting with us, following what we're doing and sharing back your activities, products and lessons. Here are some ways:

Let's meet face-to-face. We're helping organize a series of 1-day events in cities around the country.  These "Green Innovation in Business Solutions Labs" are "open space" events with lots of opportunity to network and share experience. We will be in 10 cities in 2010. In addition to Durham, NC (where we were in January), we'll have events in Washington DC, New York, Fayetteville, Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle, San Jose, Boston, and Austin. To get announcements about Solutions Labs activity, add your email address to the list.  You'll get a few emails each month letting you know what's coming up next as well as reports from the Solutions Labs after they happen.

If you can't make one of the Solutions Labs, you can look for us at another event in which we are participating. We keep a calendar of "events of interest" and mark the ones where you can find EDF staff. You can find out what we look like and are interested in on these individual Corporate Partnerships team bio pages.

Talk to us via phone. We host EDFix Conference Calls twice a month which featuring doers and thinkers of note. You can join us for these calls every 2nd and 4th Monday at 9 AM PT (noon ET). To receive announcements about upcoming calls and find out what happened in calls you missed, add your email address to this list.  We send emails to announce the topics a few days before each call, as well as "afterthoughts" a few days after each call.

Staying in-touch on-line.

• The best way to learn about what we are doing is to follow postings to the Innovation Exchange blog. Almost all our activities and new materials end up on the blog in some  form. You can follow via RSS feed or email [1 email every weekday or two].
• We have organized lessons learned, tools and other guidance developed from our 20 years of experience working with business on our Innovation Exchange website.
• We also use Twitter daily. You can follow us @EDFix and tag your tweets with #EDFix to be sure we see them.
• We maintain a set of "bookmarks" of what we are reading on Del.icio.us – you can visit Delicious or subscribe to our feed using Google Reader to see green business, innovation and other stories that we think are interesting.

Following one of our projects. Perhaps you don't want to know about everything we are doing, but would like to hear news about a specific project.  You can sign-up for project-specific email announcements for these projects [each tends to generate less than one email per week]:

• Private equity / Green Returns – work with KKR and other private equity firms
• Fleet vehicles – work with car and truck fleets
• Climate Corps – MBA students work with companies on energy efficiency
• Walmart Partnership – on-going, multi-faceted work with Walmart

(Note: if you are already signed up for all the blog announcements, you don't need to sign up for the projects too.)

Tracking EDFix Strategy. If you are really interested in the objectives and approach of EDF's Innovation Exchange – details about what we are thinking, planning to do, and why – please participate in the EDF Innovation Exchange Community Google Group, which contains strategy and planning documents we're using as we set up and assess our work. Sign-up with the group to participate. [There is a low level of email activity.]

Contact me. If all else fails, contact me — 202 572 3250 via phone, dwitzel@edf.org via email, @dwitzel (or @EDFix) on twitter or on Linkedin.

I'm looking forward to being in touch.

Medium-duty trucks are the workhorses of the American economy. They deliver food and beverages to restaurants and convenience stores, drop off packages at homes and offices, serve as mobile workshops for all types of technicians and perform thousands of other daily tasks. They are also responsible for producing over 80 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year.

To help fleets reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and harness cost savings, Environmental Defense Fund teamed up with past partner PHH Arval, a leading fleet management company, to identify and showcase a number of effective and replicable strategies to reduce emissions and costs from medium-duty trucks.

Highlights of this new whitepaper, available at http://edf.org/greenfleet, include:

• How Frito-Lay saved 10% on fuel by downsizing its urban grocery store delivery truck model from a 24-foot Class 6 straight truck to a 20-foot Class 5;
• How by reducing speeding and after hours use and deploying a telematics solution, LKQ decreased idling by 62% and saved 16 gallons of fuel per vehicle each month;
• How Staples modified the transmission control unit and installed speed governors to increased the fuel economy of its single-unit trucks by 12-16% and
• How PoolCorp improved fuel economy by 4% by making adjustments to the Engine Control Module (ECM) that limit speed and shorten engine idle intervals.

Recognizing that every fleet is different, the whitepaper showcases 14 strategies and includes options for every duty cycle to improve efficiency and cut emissions.

Look for opportunities to drive medium-duty trucks in your fleet onto the onramp of a lower-carbon future.

This content is cross-posted on Greenbiz.com

Over the last couple of days, I’ve heard business titans from Disney’s CEO Robert Iger to legendary oilman T. Boone Pickens to coal and mining magnate Tom Albanese of Rio Tinto espousing a similar thought – that they’re going full steam ahead with their sustainability strategies and investments in clean energy technology because it makes good business sense. In other words, it doesn’t matter what you believe about climate science; if you’re interested in business (and national) competitiveness, prudent resource and fiscal management and brand and reputational value, you should do exactly the same things as you would if you were driven solely by climate worries.

This extraordinary conversation took place at the third annual Wall Street Journal ECO:nomics conference in Santa Barbara. I went there hoping to hear what business was thinking in the wake of a disappointing Copenhagen convention and stalled action in on climate and energy in Congress.

Were they backing away from their environmental initiatives? Waiting it out?

Overwhelmingly, the answer was no.

Mike Morris, CEO of American Electric Power may have put it best when he said that if the science is wrong and we act now, we’ll still have made the world a better place and have strengthened our business position. If the science is right, and we don’t act now, there could be devastating results.

Boone Pickens hit hard on the competitiveness angle, noting China’s aggressive investments in clean energy manufacturing. This view was shared by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, who said, “America still has an opportunity to lead, but time is running out.”

These business leaders are moving ahead to get in front of the clean energy economy and to hedge against resource constraints and volatile oil prices. They know it’s a great bet, no matter what your ideology. If only our political leaders could do the same.



Anthony Williams, co-author of Wikinomics and its forthcoming sequel, Macrowikinomics, joined the EDFix call on Feb. 22 to give us his insights into new approaches for large-scale change we will increasingly see for addressing global issues.

His thesis is that problems like climate change won't be solved by global initiatives like COP15 alone. We also need myriad small, distributed experiments and social innovations. These will help change percolate to every corner of the planet through willing participants, rather than relying on mandates or regulations from above.

As Wikinomics describes, we're seeing creative new approaches to collaboration in efforts like open source software projects and Wikipedia. It was encouraging to hear Anthony describe how these approaches are being demonstrated in small projects (like Carbon Rally and CARMA) as well as adopted in large enterprises like IBM.

Anthony's recent work helps to explain broader principles that enable these change strategies. He emphasized transparency, openness, and collaboration but also the concept of integrity and the need for inter-generational thinking. Mobile phones are very quickly connecting communities that are so poor that it seemed they would remain unheard forever. Business, governments and society are finding new symbiotic relationships.

The next EDFix call, on Monday March 8, will build on these themes to explore how principles learned from development of Open Source Software can be applied in other business settings.  We'll be joined by Brian Behlendorf, who was  part of the community that developed and managed the hugely successful Apache web server and is now applying what he learned to his work on health IT working with the Department of Health and Human Services.  Please join us!

• Phone number: +1 (213) 289-0500
• Code: 267-6815

Get Updates about EDFix Conference Calls

If you'd like to get announcements about upcoming EDFix conference calls and the results with podcast releases, please sign-up here:

“How are companies addressing the environmental impact of transportation in their supply chains?” This was the leading question of a recent article in the MIT Sloan Management Review business journal. Its well worth reading for anyone interested in corporate transportation emissions.

The article is wide-ranging; covering air, rail, long-haul trucks, and light-duty fleets. Read more »

This post is by Tony Kreindler, media director for the National Climate Campaign at Environmental Defense Fund.

A majority of Americans are worried that the United States’ role in the world economy will diminish in the coming years, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

But the truth is, China is already beating the U.S. to clean energy jobs. Read more »

Many organizations now rely on open source software, ranging from the famed Linux operating system to its web-server cousin Apache, right down to curiously named programs like jboss, tomcat, Moodle, Drupal, mailman, SugarCRM, Zimbra, Asterisk and smarty.

But how many have adopted open source processes? The programmer communities that designed those applications (and the Internet they mostly ride) developed principles and practices that are broadly useful. These include keeping the code and the conversations completely open to outsiders, governance and licensing models, and platform and interoperability strategies.

We have an opportunity to take a quick, deep dive into a particular situation where these dynamics are at work. Read more »

On March 3^rd, Gwen Ruta will be a “working-group facilitator” at The Wall Street Journal’s ECO:nomics Conference in Santa Barbara, CA.

From March 9^th thru March 12^th Jana Holt and Jason Mathers will be at the National Truck Equipment Association’s Work Truck Show in St. Louis, MO. In Conjunction with the Work Truck Show, Jana will be speaking at The Green Truck Summit on Incentives on March 9^th. At the event, EDF will be showcasing a new white-paper on greenhouse management for medium duty trucks, based on our Green Fleet program.

Business author Bruce Piasecki will be speaking at the National Press Club’s Holeman Lounge on March 10^th about his book "The Surprising Solution," and Dave Witzel will attend the event to learn more about "Succeeding in a Carbon and Capital Constrained World."

Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp and Director of Marketing Communications for Corporate Partnerships, Melanie Janin will be in New York City on March 15^th for the Economist’s Corporate Citizenship Conference where former President Bill Clinton will give the keynote address. Read more »