Business Plan challenge
Objective: To find and implement scalable environmental projects that maximize the environmental yield of each investment. The search is particularly geared toward energy projects to take advantage of my career experience and interest.

Discussion: After admitting that enviromental goals are worthwhile, it behooves the philanthropist to set about pursuing them with the same rigor employed by investment professionals. Without the tools of economics and business, the environmental venture risks squandering the finite resources allowed it and confirming the self-serving view of some industrialists that preserving and restoring the environment is "too expensive" or "impossible." With that in mind, a few principles are worth noting:

• Reducing demand is generally better for the environment than increasing supply. It is also usually cheaper.
• Subsidizing the supply of a commodity (as in energy) by ensuring the provenance of some portion of supply from renewable resources (wind or solar) will serve to decrease the market clearing cost. This effectively spurs demand for energy consumption. Remember the P/Q curve?
• The economics of energy investments are often perverted by government subsidies that are more politically driven than goal driven. It is important to keep in mind that those perversions can obscure the real economics of a solution. With sufficient level of government largesse, resources and focus can actually be diverted from viable solutions in favor of forced solutions. Some of these solutions defy the inherent economics.
• Protecting the environment could really benefit from government involvement. Ideally, this would not be technology subsidies, but a more honest attempt to value collective goods and put a price tag on negative externalities.
• Solving problems takes effort. Solving big problems takes significant effort. MoneyMoney is just modernity's way of measuring how much.
• As my buddy Ted pointed out to me, the fact that our environment will be worse in 50 years than it is today, cannot be discounted by 50 years, because it makes me sad today. Sad enough that I am willing to work on it.

Next Steps:

1. Determine the level of annual commitment I am willing to make to the environment. I expect that my most effective contribution will be in helping others effectively deploy their environmental budget.
2. Enlist the help and support of my wife, who is also knowledgeable in the field.
3. Engage other like-minded friends in the cause
4. Design metrics that measure environmental benefit. (the environmental equivalent of money)
5. Build a "business plan" that will look for projects that are replicable, and maximally effective.
6. Roll out the plan to let others share the cost of social investing with the comfort that they are doing so efficiently.

  ¶ 8:07 PM