A week ago today President Obama issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to lead by example in their efforts to address environmental issues surrounding energy, carbon, water, and waste.  I’m not going to go into detail on describing the contents of the EO, you can review it yourself here.  Instead I wanted to give you my thoughts on it, looking at the timing of its release, the way it mirrors how private sector organizations are addressing sustainability, the major concern I have with it, and some questions that remain unanswered.  One thing is certain the federal agencies now have their work cut out for them to achieve quite a bit in the next 90 days.

First, if we consider the timing of this executive order the cynic would say that the only reason this is being done is as an effort to try and save some face for the US when it goes to Copenhagen in December.  Just recently the administration finally admitted what we all knew for some time now, and that is that the US won’t have a climate change bill in place before Copenhagen (news stories here and here). Others may say given the recent finalization of the EPA’s ruling (official press release here; news story here), it would be hypocritical if the federal government didn’t put in place a program, such as what is required by this executive order.  All of these are valid arguments, but I would instead like to focus on the positive and that is that it is leading to action being taken.  Taking action has been very hard for the US government, and it has reached the point where the only way action occurs is for the EPA to leverage the Clean Air Act or the President to issue an executive order.

In reading the EO, one thing stood out to me and that is it appeared heavily influenced by how the private sector is going about addressing these challenges.  For example, the role of the senior sustainability officer equates to a chief sustainability officer.  We have been talking to organizations for some time now about the importance of taken a governed approach to sustainability.  This is exactly what the EO focuses on.  Making sure you have a systematic approach to sustainability to help you make the right investment choices to achieve your goals.  How often do you see anything from the federal government mention ROI?  It talks about being transparent in showing how the investment decisions were made as well as showing the results of those investments.  Transparency is critical here, as you can learn which initiatives are delivering the results and which aren’t.  Those that work can be implemented across agencies and the ones that don’t need to either be shutdown or modified to ensure success.  These are all things that private sector organizations that understand the importance of a systematic approach to sustainability are doing already.

The biggest concern I have about the EO is that I am not sure how the agencies will actually be able to meet those very tight timelines.  Having spent time speaking to many organizations in both the public and private sector around the world, it is apparent to me that unless the organization has already been focusing on these efforts to understand their baseline for scope 1 and 2 emissions they won’t be able to start now and still meet the deadline.  At an event in DC last week speaking to an audience of largely representatives of federal agencies about these issues, I asked how many have a basic understanding of what needs to be done to calculate one’s carbon footprint.  Only two hands went up in the entire audience, and one was from my co-presenter and the other worker with the co-presenter.  This didn’t give me a confident feeling that within 90 days these agencies will know their 2008 baseline and have enough insight into that information and the initiatives they could put in place to achieve their 2020 goal that they will define.  I won’t even go into the scope 3 mandate, which is even more challenging.  One just needs to ask any organization that is investigating scope 3 emissions from its value chain to know its difficulty. 

I have posed a few questions that don’t appear to be addressed in the EO.  I am interested in understanding the answers to them.  They are:

• What if any verification process is going to occur to ensure consistency and accuracy of the data collection?
• What happens if the bottom-up targets rolled up have a less than stellar total target for the federal government?
• What happens if the agencies don’t meet the deadlines in the EO or miss their defined goals?

Much like the UK’s CRC where everyone is a critic about how it is flawed, many people will find fault with this EO.  Some will say it goes too far and there are other more important things to focus on.  Others will say giving the agencies the option to set their own goals bottom-up won’t make the impact that is required.  My view is at the end of the day, the EO is forcing action to occur.  It may not be perfect, but at this point continuing an endless debate to come up with the perfect system is clearly not working.  The EO puts the debate aside at least for federal agencies and forces action to be taken.  This is a step in the right direction.

Terrence G. Clark - Senior Vice President and GM 
CA ecoSoftware
terrence.clark@ca.com