Congratulation to the Presidio School of Management team that beat out teams from Stanford University and University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business to win the Western Regional competition of Wal-Mart's second annual Better Living Business Plan Challenge. The Challenge gives business students around the world the opportunity to invent sustainable products and business solutions.

Sandra Kwak, Kendall Laine, and Elizabeth Stuart from Presidio will compete against seven other teams in the semi-finals in Bentonville, Arkansas, in April. Three finalist teams will present to an executive panel, including former Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott, and executives from leading companies and non-governmental organizations. Wal-Mart will present the winning team with a $20,000 prize that can be used as seed money to fund their venture.

“We are thrilled to have the opportunity to compete and incorporate everything we are learning in our Sustainable Management MBA program into our business plan,” said Stuart. “The judges were impressed with the innovative Presidio approach to making a strong business case for sustainability.”

The Presidio team wrote its plan for an easy-to-use, smart-energy product called a Powerzoa, a plug that meters and controls energy use as it connects to a Web site displaying energy use information. The students business plan incorporates sustainability principles throughout, in a compelling, integrated bottom-line approach. Along with three other classmates, the students, who will complete their MBA degrees this May, developed the product idea last semester in a class on sustainable products and services.

The team will develop a product prototype of Powerzoa and research product viability as they explore starting a company to develop and market the product.

Hunter continues consulting with and teaching at Presidio School of Management, one of the first schools in the country offering an MBA in Sustainable Management. With an emphasis on whole systems, the school’s curriculum teaches "integrated bottom line" sustainability principles that serve as the foundation of a strategic commitment to sustainability.

At last writing, Thanksgiving, I was grateful that a blown engine on my flight from Stockholm didn’t scatter our airplane over the north Atlantic and I was home to actually spend some time in Colorado.

It went to writing on our about-to-emerge, “Solutions at the Speed of Business.” This Web-based manual, which should be released within the next few weeks, is eagerly awaited by utilities, chambers of commerce, economic development agencies, and others because it will help small businesses cut their carbon emissions profitably. The manual will get a first workout as Natural Capitalism Solutions helps the city of Boulder cut its carbon emissions. The city, the first in the United States to implement a carbon tax, has been dismayed to find its carbon emissions still going up. Given that small businesses are half of the national economy, and far more than that in towns like Boulder, helping them cut their energy use and thus their carbon emissions cannot only help protect the climate, but also rescue the economy.

The first speech of the day done, I screamed across Los Angeles to give another at Cal State Northridge, before flying north to teach. Los Angeles has to be one of the least sustainable cities in the world, but I guess it was good to get a reminder of what those freeways are like.

I also attended the board meeting for the National Teach-In on Global Warming: Solutions for the First 100 Days, an organization founded by Dr. Eban Goodstein and sheltered under Natural Capitalism. Eban and his staff have gathered over 800 colleges, universities, high schools, faith organizations, and civic groups to call for an end to the fossil-fuel era and action to build a sustainable global economy on a clean energy foundation.

Jeff Hohensee and I spent an evening in the city of Golden talking with the mayor, the city council, and a room full of Golden citizens about climate change, peak oil, and what the implications of these are for citizens living along the Front Range of Colorado.

The debate, however, appeared to have been rigged. Audience vote before and after the debate determined the winners. Before we started, an amazingly large part of the audience, people who wanted to pay $40 to come hear us fight, declared themselves undecided. I say amazingly because judging from the cheering as the different sides made points during the fight, opinions really ran about 50/50. And that’s how the final vote came out, giving the “win” to our opponents. The audience included a large number of students invited by the foundation that put this thing on, most of whom were rabidly against any form of climate protection. Afterwards these students were chortling about how they shifted their vote following the debate supposedly having changed their minds. In truth, I doubt either side changed any minds at all, but hopefully somebody learned something in the process. I sure learned that it’s worth knowing who’s organizing an event before agreeing to what smelled remarkably like a setup.

Then on to San Francisco to work with a group of our students who have entered the Wal-Mart Challenge — a business plan competition for sustainable business. A team of business people who have served on the Presidio Board and several faulty selected one of the various Presidio teams to advance to the regional competition. A month later I joined the team at the San Francisco offices of Environmental Defense. A team of a venture capitalist, a utility executive, an Environmental Defense representative, and a gentleman from Wal-Mart heard presentations from teams from various western business schools. Our team presented brilliantly, an opinion, it turned out that was held by more than me — the team won! In April I will journey with them to Bentonville, Arkansas, to lend a hand as they take on teams from across the country. It is truly hard to tell you how proud I am of our students. Win, lose, or draw, they beat the teams from Stanford and Haas (University of California at Berkeley). The business schools people ask us how Presidio compares. Pretty dern well.  

The time in paradise was filled with meetings, radio and TV interviews, and filming a spot to help out a company building bamboo houses and meetings. Chatting with some of the leaders of Maui Tomorrow, the group that has labored for years to keep Maui a paradise, it was very cool to discover that some work I did with them 10 years ago succeeded in killing a coal plant. I thought we’d failed. The plant had been permitted and I’d assumed we had given it a good shot and lost. But the plant was never built. The arguments we made led the regulators to put sufficient conditions on the project that its proponents decided it was not a good idea. I woke to a lovely sunny morning looking to the west ridge of Maui at a beautiful line of windmills marching up the ridge. More are planned. The company Pacific Biodiesel is developing renewable fuels in Hawaii and elsewhere...Every now and then you realize that you’ve made a difference.

I crawled home to recuperate from a respiratory bug that caught me on the plane. Continuing to fly when your lungs are filling is a real bad idea, but I’d little choice. But by the time I was home, it’d become pneumonia. Believe it or not, that even slowed me down —for a couple of days.

This is a sea change. For years I have been going around all these events and getting in fights with folks. I take a provocative position that sustainability is the imperative, then get a lot of push back. Now, except for a few sponsored students at the New York debate, I’m not getting much push back.

Toby Russell and I then did some video filming with Nancy Clanton of Clanton and Associates — one of the world’s leading firms in energy efficient lighting. Nancy graciously has agreed to serve as the video guide for the lighting section of our new “Solutions at the Speed of Business” manual. She guides small businesses in what they need to cut the costs of providing superior quality light while reducing their carbon emissions.

I then did a fabulous thing: woke up in my own bed, had breakfast in my own kitchen, cuddled my mom cat, drove a few minutes down the road to University of Colorado-Boulder, and sat in front of a videoconference rig to keynote the Green Meetings Industry Council’s conference across the country in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. Seemed a good way to talk about how to “green” meetings. Afterwards in a Q&A session with the audience, they asked how I liked doing a keynote by videoconference.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I replied, “I love it.” Nick Sterling, who is on our staff, had calculated that I’d saved 1200 pounds of carbon because I didn’t climb on an airplane and fly to Pennsylvania and back. I then asked the participants, “How did you like this? Did this work for you?” The green meeting participants cheered loudly. Thanks to a most gracious gift to Natural Capitalism from City IS of a video conferencing rig, we’ll be using this technology frequently now as a way of cutting our carbon footprint.

A couple weeks later I was in conversation with somebody who said they now have a way of doing virtual trade shows, where rather than climbing on an airplane and flying to the expo, you go to a Web site and virtually walk around the trade show, but without having to bump into all the crowds. You come to a booth and you look at the stuff displayed. A virtual person answers any questions you may have, explaining what they are selling. If there is a brochure you want, you hone in on it, and read it. If you want it, you click on it and it downloads to your computer. It’s a true Web 2.0 experience of being at a trade show, only nobody has to go anywhere. This whole field is just advancing dramatically.

The reason I was in that part of the world was to spend a day with the faculty and trustees of Pomona College, who were meeting in Ojai to consider how to promote sustainability at the college. On the drive south, I met with a green architect who is rebuilding some of the houses that burned in the Montecito fire, making it to the Ojai Inn just in time to have supper with the president of Pomona. The next day went to speaking on panels discussing various world issues and then giving the keynote talk that evening on the business case for colleges going green.

They were right. Somewhere over the Pacific I caught the mother of all colds. I know, I should take seriously the recommendation to not fly with a head cold — it can blow your eardrums. I got by gobbling decongestants as soon as the pilot said we are beginning our descent.

It might have been better to declare a breakdown and stay home, but I turned around and headed for Seattle to speak to a meeting of corporate strategists. I once again found myself in a roomful of people who were not arguing over the nature of the crisis or the solution — just how to go about solving the challenges.

Then south to teach at Presidio; and east to keynote a World Wildlife Fund conference on climate and shoot a PBS special; and the spring looks very like the winter and the fall before that...

On a plane to somewhere, I picked up a Wall Street Journal article on how to Twitter. Check it out. Some time in the next month or so, this tedious tome will go away, and I’ll be tweeting to all who want to tune in to, “Where in the world is Hunter Lovins.”