Fall 2021 marks the arrival of the book “Climate Positive Business: How You and Your Company Hit Bold Climate Goals and Go Net Zero”!

I’ve distilled thousands of consulting hours into what I hope is an easily and enjoyably read book. Low on obscure jargon and high in essential mental nutrients, you get motivated and energized in just 160 pages.

The purpose of the book is not merely to equip sustainability directors, staff and consultants on greenhouse gas accounting. Those fundamentals are important, but can be accessed from other sources. At least as critical are the lessons learned from others who’ve worked through the process. Lessons lie in:

• GHG reduction tactics. Some tactics are more robust than others. Some are more credible than others.
• Avoiding pitfalls. Understand the areas of controversy and how to avoid them.
• Best practices. Whether data management techniques or making public claims, there’s plenty to consider in your quest for the best path forward to craft and implement bold climate strategy.
• Context! See the intersections and beyond-climate issues that you need to incorporate into your business strategy.

We can do this. You and your business can do this. Here’s an excerpt.

Reduce GHG! The Saga Continues

“We need to get to zero net greenhouse gas emissions in every sector of the economy within 50 years—and . . . we need to be on a path to doing it in the next 10 years.”

– Bill Gates

From measurement of climate impacts we move onto reduction of those climate impacts, and the content of what you do to bring GHG emissions down, so your measurements start to show the results that you wish to see.

As you work through this section of climate solutions, keep asking yourself these questions:

·      Is this solution truly reducing GHGs in the air, whether eliminating emissions, reducing the rate of emissions, or removing the GHG that’s already in the air?

·      Are there multiple benefits from the climate solution? Does it improve biodiversity, contribute to social justice, or create other benefits? Or does it solely focus on reducing GHG in the air?

·      For solutions that involve carbon removal (to be defined later), how permanent is the solution’s GHG removal? Is there risk that captured carbon will be re-released back into the air?

Before getting into reduction details, however, let’s segue to the big picture.

Carbon is impressively maligned, considering it’s a simple element in the periodic table, and responsible for all life on the planet. We clearly do not have a problem with the element itself. We celebrate carbon as a key component of all beings. The problem is the sudden increase of its most oxidized form (CO2) in our atmosphere, when we and much of life have comfortably evolved with lower levels of CO2 around.

It turns out we have nine limits on a planetary level, as articulated by the Stockholm Resilience Center. As depicted in Figure 3.1, four of them have been exceeded as of 2015 (yellow or red), three were deemed in the safe zone (green), and two were unknown.

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Look forward to the full work!