The Bottom-Up Search for Climate Solutions

by Te-Ping Chen · 2010-02-22 12:02:00 UTC
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Whatever epithet you prefer -- a  "shameful, monumental failure" or "BrokenHagen" -- the outcome of December's climate negotiations in Denmark was a pretty bleak testimonial to the ability of nations to cooperate on any issue, let alone one as pressing as climate change.

But Anthony Williams, co-author of Wikinomics, argues that a collective faith in global bureaucracies and nations' competing self-interests was probably misguided in the first place. As Williams put it in a call hosted by the Environmental Defense Fund today, given an "absence of effective leadership in government and business," the real challenge is to find the social innovations that work and scale them up.

To be sure, Williams is careful to note that there's definitely an important role for both government and big business to play. As he says, there's a growing consensus around the fact that corporations need to be judged by a broader metric of success -- and as Nathaniel wrote this morning, there's also an increasing awareness that corporate social engagement can and should involve skill and capacity transfers, as well as traditional philanthropy.

Still, though, Williams argues the real innovations that give him hope on climate change are happening around the margins. Take companies like Zipcar, which are helping redefine ideas of need and ownership. Or GoLoco (tagline: the Ride is the Revolution).

Likewise, Williams cites two other companies that he thinks can harness shared community and sunlight (both literally and in the form of transparency) to create serious leverage. The first is CarbonRally, which so far has convinced 40,000 people to adjust their day-to-day habits and reduce CO2 emissions by some 4,500 tons (for example, by going solar) -- the equivalent of taking 890 cars off the road for a year. And then there's CARMA, which lets users search by city and zip code to figure out which companies are located nearby, as well as their environmental impact -- and to take action, as well.

Whether or not Copenhagen marks a moment to dismantle the "reigning orthodoxy" of a nationally-oriented system -- as Williams puts it -- these companies are definitely worth checking out. At the very least, when it comes to initiatives that can genuinely shift bottom-up behavior, it's innovators like these who are helping to lead the way.

Photo Credit: Liberal Democrats

Te-Ping Chen Te-Ping Chen is a freelance writer and U.S. Truman Scholar whose writing has appeared in the Nation Magazine, the South China Morning Post magazine, Le Soir, and Slate.com.
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