Sustainability Plan for Your Business or Institution
Roy Morrison & Associates LLC can work with you to develop a comprehensive and cost effective sustainability strategy for your business or institution. We will pay careful attention to your existing conditions, your available resources, and your goals.
We bring to sustainability planning a focus on your ability to operate highly efficiently and profitably in accord with the triple bottom line of the economic, the ecological, and the social. In the long run, we must be successful in all three.
Sustainability planning can involve a variety of tasks that can include:
- Engineering analysis of your operations to improve efficiency and to determine cost effective opportunities to use renewable resources.
- Cost containment and renewable resource energy purchase strategies including the use of innovative renewable resource hedge and purchase plans.
- Purchasing, resource use, and recycling opportunities that contribute to the triple bottom line.
- Educational and organizational plans to involve staff and users in the sustainability effort.
We offer innovative engineering solutions to sustainability challenges.
Roy Morrison is a energy consultant with over 25 years of diverse experience. He is also a leading writer on questions of sustainability and ecological transformation. His books include Ecological Democracy (South End Press, 1985), Ecological Investigations (Glad Day Books, 2001), Tax Pollution, Not Income (Writers Publishing Cooperative, 2003) and Eco Civilization 2144 (forthcoming in 2005). <Link to my resumes in About RMA section>
Pentti Aalto is an outstanding energy analyst and consultant. He has more than 25 years experience in development of innovative energy solutions. He has outstanding experience with plant pinch point energy analysis, ground source heat pumps, district heating, biomass energy , cogeneration, and energy markets, regulatory and policy developments including those for retail competition in the electric industry.
Casting Light on Sustainability
Sustainability broadly means the ability of future generations in an ecological civilization to continue to have the same opportunities we have today within the context of an inextricably linked and co-evolving natural and social ecology. Sustainability is hard to define from within an industrial perspective predicated on endless growth that treats all economic activity as equally good, whether it is a billion dollars spent on oil spill cleanups or on appropriately sited, community controlled wind turbines.
Sustainability represents the emergence of a comprehensive, dynamic and evolving set of limits, market rules and practices, regulations, and equilibrating mechanisms, policies, and institutions. Sustainability will permit the continuation, prosperity, and near global spread of an advanced technological civilization rooted in democracy, and the practical application of peace and justice and an ecological economics.
The resolution of the ceaseless questions of what sustainability means and how it is applied is a matter that is at once economic, social, political and philosophical. These questions will be at the core of an ecological social order, its democratic political processes, and the relationships it crafts between freedom and community that shapes personal and social practice. This does not mean that sustainability can never be valued and counted, but that that valuation and counting be done very carefully.
We should respect and harness, not reject, the power of the market in our common pursuit of sustainability. Ecological taxation, taxing pollution instead of income, can help the market to get prices right and make what is saintianable cheaper by making what is polluting charge its true costs.
Since 1945, for example, global carbon dioxide emissions have increased almost every year with just a few notable exceptions. It was the OPEC oil embargoes in 1974 and 1979 and that led to soaring oil prices and a global decrease in carbon emissions in 1975 and in 1980-2. Our kid’s future will not be secured by modest regulatory measures such as the Kyoto accords. We cannot afford to just tinker on the margins with regulation. We need enlist the power of the market today in the cause of sustainability, peace and prosperity.
