Options can help firms reduce carbon footprint, summit speakers say

David R. Baker, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 11, 2007


California's fight against global warming need not destroy local businesses, speakers told the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce's annual CitySummit Monday. Instead, those businesses have more options than they realize for cutting their greenhouse gas emissions. And many of those options can save cash.

The chamber organized Monday's summit with those solutions in mind. Part economics lecture and part workshop, the summit brought together businesses and government officials to discuss what California's historic push to limit greenhouse gases could mean to individual businesses in the state. Legislation signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last September commits the state to cutting its greenhouse gas emissions 25 percent by 2020. Opponents of capping carbon dioxide - the most common greenhouse gas - often warn of economic calamity if the state pushes ahead. Economists have issued dueling studies of the effort's potential cost compared with the cost of letting the planet continue to warm.

Many of the people assembled for the summit, however, said their businesses have already found ways to cut energy use, which in turn will reduce the amount of carbon dioxide they produce. "There may be a little up-front cost in some aspects, but in the long run, you're almost certainly going to save money," said Stefan Muhle, general manager of Orchard Hotels.
His company, which runs two hotels in San Francisco, started looking at energy efficiency five years ago, pursuing it primarily as a way to cut operating costs.

Orchard ended up installing in one of the hotels a system that turns on a room's lights and air conditioning only when the guest is there. The company expects to save between $500 and $1,500 per month on its electricity bill, and the system could pay for itself in as little as two years. "Back in 2002, we started going green - we just didn't know it yet," Muhle said.
The Safeway grocery chain has been buying electricity from wind farms and recently installed an acre of solar panels on the roof of one of its Bay Area stores, Senior Vice President Joseph Pettus said. Safeway plans to blanket more of its stores with solar panels and is testing biodiesel in some of its trucks.

Catholic Healthcare West has rigged one of its hospitals, in Santa Maria (Santa Barbara County), to run on electricity generated by burning methane from a nearby landfill, said Vice President Jeffrey Land. The not-for-profit health care company also is installing advanced electricity meters that will allow it to simultaneously check energy usage in all of its facilities every 15 minutes, helping to spot hospitals and offices where the equipment isn't as efficient as it could be. The company estimates that could help improve energy efficiency by 15 percent.

"That's thousands and thousands of tons of carbon that won't be in the air," Land said. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom told the crowd that the city has already made strides on its goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 20 percent below their 1990 level by 2012.

According to the city's Department of the Environment, San Francisco's emissions peaked in 2000 at 9.7 million tons of carbon dioxide per year and have since fallen to 9.2 million tons. In 1990, the city emitted about 9.1 million tons. Newsom touted some of the city's steps that have contributed to that goal, such as adding more alternative-fuel vehicles to the city's fleet and placing solar arrays on such buildings as the Moscone Center. But he conceded that the city has far more to do.

"We've been playing in the margins," he said. "To get to the more audacious 20 percent goal, we're going to need to do things differently." He also said the city must do more to attract "green-collar" jobs for the middle class and working class, not just the elites. "We believe we can't grow the economy otherwise, unless we create those green-collar jobs to replace the blue-collar jobs we've lost," Newsom said.

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