Green Business Energy Use

The greatest challenge and the source of some of the greatest opportunities in greening your business will come in the area of business energy use. Energy, at least for the present, is inextricably linked to carbon emissions that are fueling the dramatic changes to the world’s climate that we are already beginning to experience. Human energy use is, by far, the main culprit behind climate change—literally the fossil-fuel-belching smoking gun, pointed directly at the earth’s climate. As such, reining in energy use and changing basic energy sources—from old fossil-fuel-based to new renewable—are at the very heart of any efforts to effectively green the business world.

The growing consensus among both the scientific and business communities is that humanity must, at a minimum, reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by around 80 percent in the next few decades in order to begin to stabilize the global atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content and, hopefully, avoid the worst manifestations of climate change. To reach this astonishing reduction will require an almost unimaginable transformation of the world’s energy infrastructure. Whether you agree with this assessment or not is completely irrelevant to its coming impact on your business. The immense changes that will be required to meet this goal will devastate some businesses and provide enormous opportunities for others. Like any sweeping change, those businesses that begin now to prepare for this transformation will be on the winning side. Those that ignore this inevitable future will falter and eventually fail. The best time for your business to begin its transition to a ruthlessly energy-efficient future was, well . . . 1978. The second best time is today.