LAST WORD

Bob Sheppard, the deputy director of Portsmouth-based Clean Air-Cool Planet, is making fewer cold calls as businesses call him for assistance in global climate change and sustainability issues. Michael McCord photo

What a difference a year can make. Bob Sheppard, the deputy director of the Portsmouth-based environmental consulting firm Clean Air-Cool Planet, is making far fewer cold calls to businesses and corporations to offer CA-CP's services. The trend has changed dramatically and now the business executives at all levels are calling Sheppard and his CA-CP colleagues.

The transformation from "who are you?" to "hey, help us out" has left Sheppard pleasantly surprised. For nonprofit organizations such as CA-CP, he said they knew the time awareness tide would shift and in 2006, what happened was a major seismic shift in public awareness.

Pardon the cliché but it was a perfect storm of publicity, international reports, major magazine cover stories and a minor documentary called "An Inconvenient Truth" that escalated the profile of global climate change — and accompanying interest about local sustainability issues.

"'An Inconvenient Truth' was important because this simple power presentation allowed people to visualize what is going on," Sheppard said.

It also didn't hurt that even the Bush administration, which had practiced a decidedly jaundiced view about climate change — something about still waiting for science to come in — admitted that polar bears might face extinction due to the rapid melting of polar ice caps. Throw in rising energy prices and global uncertainty, and you have a business climate ripe for major change — and a year in which "carbon offset" became one of the hottest terms around.

"It's a much different world," Sheppard told me about the change of pace in his business, which has never been busier. He cites major energy companies such as Duke Energy and corporations such as Wal-Mart which have seen the sustainability light of smart environmentalism and good business practices.

CA-CP's goal since its founding in 2000 has been to find and promote the best solutions for reducing the human impact on global warming. CA-CP works with businesses, educational campuses, nonprofit organizations and scientific centers, mostly in the Northeast, and the results, often small steps multiplied, have been dramatic by any measure.

What is happening is an outbreak of enlightened self-interest that is crossing political partisan lines.

For example, Sheppard tells me, consider what Maine-based Oakhurst Dairy has done.

Since 2001, Oakhurst has completed a greenhouse gas emissions inventory; undergone a formal energy audit; and worked to make their sales and distribution fleets more environmentally friendly. In November of last year, Oakhurst announced it was transforming 130 delivery trucks, or more than 90 percent of its fleet, to soy-based biodiesel fuel.

The switch has left Oakhurst with the largest private biodiesel truck fleet in New England while reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 1,332 tons per year — and the move was met with enthusiastic approval by its customers.

Or Shaw's Supermarkets which has worked with CA-CP on 24 projects ranging from energy audits to buying renewable energy. In this decade, Shaw's has instituted a major energy efficiency program in all its 200 stores, educated all its 28,000 employees and has accrued annual savings of around $3 million a year. Or translated another way, the grocery chain would have to sell $150 million of goods to realize such a return.

Closer to home, there's Timberland, which has become a company known for its trailblazing activism. It encourages employees to buy hybrid cars and has created its own small and large renewable energy projects in California and the Dominican Republic.

But the changes aren't only for big corporations. More of Sheppard's calls are coming from small business owners looking to reduce their environmental footprint.

Sheppard says that while making public presentations he encounters climate change skeptics who claim the fuss is scientific conspiracy run amok.

"A lot of people have been in denial," Sheppard said. "You're never going to convince everyone."

Find out more about the business approach to global climate change and to Clean Air, Cool Planet at www.cleanair-coolplanet.org.