EPA is challenging Fortune 500 companies to roughly double their current level of green power purchasing. The goal will be to exceed 5 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of green power purchasing among participating companies by the end of 2007, which would be enough electricity to power more than 400,000 average American homes annually. Achieving this goal will avoid the equivalent CO2 emissions associated with more than 680,000 passenger cars each year.

http://www.epa.gov/greenpower/partners/fortune500.htm

The Marshall report, The Illusion of U.S. Energy Independence: An Assessment of the Current State of Energy Use, examines current energy independence proposals that focus on drastically reducing oil use. Since oil is primarily for transportation, these proposals would limit mobility and ration energy use. Even with efficiency gains from current technology improvements, these efforts would have a disproportionate impact on groups that can least afford the increased costs, such as the poor and the elderly.

http://www.marshall.org/article.php?id=484

So with friends like george C. marshall, we really don't need people in the middle east trying to kill us. They claim that since there is no hope to reduce our dependance on oil, we should just give in and search for more of it. I don't agree, I think we should balance our efforts, and work towards energy independance while still keeping an eye on smart exploration.

 

ag4ever,

I agree that the climate change skeptics are not doing us any favors. It's coming from the George C. Marshall Insitute. I'm not so sure the author of the Marshall Plan would care for the recommendations of the institute that bears his name.

 

I thought the list of Green Power partners was interesting. Looking at the top 10, for instance, shows that the companies who are doing the most are often not doing everything they could be doing. For instance, the one with the most potential for improvement would definitely be DuPont- even with only 4% of their energy use coming from green power, they're still fifth on the list, with around a third of the green power use as the number one company, Wells Fargo. Whole Foods, which is second, can only increase its use of green energy if its energy needs go up as a whole, because 100% already comes from green power, according to the chart.

I think the chart is interesting, but there's a lot more information I'd like to have about it to really tell what's going on here. It's hard to find Whole Foods more of a corporate do-gooder than Apple or AMD, for instance, because Apple & AMD use less energy overall AND have 100% of it coming from green power. I suppose it would only be possible to get a better sense of who is really saving power if you compared them within their own industry and against companies of a similar size, which might be impossible to do.

Anyway, one thing this chart shows is that a little public pressure on corporate companies to become corporate do-gooders can have a big effect. Even with a small fraction of it's power coming from green power suppliers, DuPont can be viewed as a leader in green energy use- so even small commitments by companies that big can lead to big change.