NEWS RELEASE                                   MARCH 2009

Sustainability and Global Warming Decisions Are Best Made With Universal Rating System

Corporations and governments are making major decisions relative to sustainability issues including energy efficiency, employee relations, global warming, health and safety.  A number of sustainability evaluation tools have been developed.  However, compartmentalization is a major flaw in all of them.  It allows fair comparison of one cigarette company to another but not fair comparison of a cigarette company to a healthcare company.

The Universal Sustainability Rating System eliminates the compartmentalization and normalizes all sustainability factors in a point system based on life quantity and quality values.  An individual willingly rides in automobiles knowing that statistically over the years it will reduce his life by seven months.  He takes many justifiable risks based on the value of life quality over quantity. 

This willingness to trade quality for quantity can be converted to points that rate any impact.  One example would be the decrease in life quality for the Cape Cod resident whose sea view is affected by an offshore wind turbine or the island native who must be displaced by rising sea levels.  It can be used to rate a donation to an art museum by a corporation or even the improvement in working conditions for developing country exporters.

Even a thorny issue such as the extinction of a species can be rated by asking how many minutes of life would the average person be willing to sacrifice for the survival of a species such as the polar bear.  The answer is likely to be considerably different than the same question posed for a malaria bearing mosquito.

Greenhouse gases and pollutants are addressed with the use of a Universal Environmental Burden Index http://www.mcilvainecompany.com/UEBI/subscriber/Default.htm .

The sustainability ratings are adjusted to present values.  Here is an example where a decision has to be made to either replace an old coal-fired power plant with a new one now or to wait 10 years and then replace the old coal-fired power plant with wind turbines.  A third alternative is to replace the old coal-fired power plant with a new one and then replace the new coal-fired power plant with wind turbines after 20 years.

The replacement of an old coal-fired power plant with a new coal-fired power plant causes a 30 percent reduction in CO₂ quickly.  By waiting 10 years prior to replacement with a wind turbine there is no CO₂ reduction for the first decade but then 100 percent reduction for the next three decades.  But using the standard 3%/yr discounting of future benefits, the value over 40 years is 9 million points vs. 5.7 million for the new coal-fired power plants.  So the discounting greatly narrows the turbine advantage.

The best scenario is the immediate replacement with a new coal-fired power plant and then replacement with wind turbines after 20 years.  The actual CO₂ reduction is 26 million tons vs. 30 million tons with the wind turbine only scenario.  However, with the discount to present value the coal/wind turbine sequence scores 9.9 million points vs. only 9 million for the wind turbine only option.

There are also very substantial sustainability points achieved through the reduction of other emissions when replacing an old coal-fired power plant with a new one.  The cost per sustainability point is also very low.  More details on this calculation are shown at:  http://www.mcilvainecompany.com/brochures/latest20news/replace_coal_plants/Replace_old_coal_plants.pdf

For more information on the Universal Sustainability Rating System contact: