Gang Green

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TIME: Even so, it's not clear that renewable energy can replace fossil fuels anytime soon, right?

SMOLIK: You'll need companion technologies. Hybrid fuel cells won't do very well if the car weighs a ton, right? We've developed lighter-weight composite materials that enable cars to have higher fuel efficiency.

LANCASTER: Think about this: fuel cells were invented in 1839. Back in the late 1800s, we could have taken the path that we did — using internal-combustion engines — or another path. So why is it now, and not 100 years ago, that we are thinking about using electrochemistry for power? Well, all of a sudden we are talking about the environment. Efficiency has never been a strong driver of new technologies in the past, but that is changing.

CORREA: Renewable energy is something we should talk about carefully. There is a perception that renewables in a large industrial economy could make up the bulk of our power. But we are just a little too far away from the sun. Whether you're talking about biomass, photovoltaics, or wind moving because the sun heats the earth differentially, it all comes from the sun. If you calculate how many watts per meter the sun puts to the earth and ask whether that is enough to run our very high energy consumption — this is a question.

TIME: Does the U.S. government have any kind of clear vision on all this?

LANCASTER: We are starting to see out of the Department of Energy a vision of where they want to take energy, and therefore technology, in the U.S. This vision is for a hydrogen economy. Time lines are still way out there.

BAVARIA: It doesn't have to be all about the Federal Government. Los Angeles and San Francisco have floated bond issues to promote alternative energy.

CORREA: The right kind of technologies tend to get developed. Government can catalyze it with this policy or that policy, but that may make it happen only a few years earlier. It is hard to imagine what in the last 100 years we might have done differently. There were no other technologies that could have had us grow to a pretty good standard of living for at least a significant fraction of the world's people.

TIME: But at what environmental cost?

LIFSET: Our economy is very effective in driving technological change, and you can see the benefits in terms of resource efficiency and reductions in pollution all around us. Companies as sophisticated as Dow or GE, first-rate companies, will produce good, responsible products. But technological change won't automatically bring about environmental protection. Consider product tagging, which is about to expand in the market in a big way. You buy a hair dryer at the drugstore, and there's a gizmo on the box that looks like a circuit or a circle of wires, and it sets off a buzzer if you leave without paying — that's one variety of product tag.

Now, combine product tags with specialized memory circuits and wireless technology, and there will be some really obvious opportunities for environmental use. We can track products, find out about people's consumption behavior. We can make bottles and cans talk to recycling equipment. But the question is, As these technologies are developed and the software coding gets standardized, will the decisions be made to include environmental information in those codes? If the rules of the game aren't set from outside, companies can't afford as much improvement. As a public, we have to demand it.

TIME: Global firms like GE and Dow have enough muscle to force — or, you might say, to free — their smaller business partners to follow better environmental standards. Is this power being used well?

SMOLIK: At Dow, we typically work with customers rather than suppliers because our suppliers are the oil companies and such. Our customers are typically companies that make products for consumers — a Nike or a Procter & Gamble. A lot of times, we have the technology for a better, more sustainable raw material that they can use. Nike, for example, is a consumer-product company, so just as soon as some particular component becomes very unpopular, they switch pretty quickly. That's why socially responsible investors and environmental groups are good. They put pressure on the system. They put pressure on the consumer-products companies, which keeps us all honest and working in the right direction.

BAVARIA: In socially responsible investing, what we do — besides allocating investment dollars based on our clients' will — is, we become active shareholders. We try to represent a shareholder constituency that might otherwise have no voice.

LIFSET: The leverage to green a supply chain comes from whoever has the power in the chain. In the U.S., that is often the retailer or the consumer-goods companies. It's not surprising that companies like GE and Dow are recipients of pressure rather than the source of it. Such influence is not always something that is conspicuous to the public eye. Yet sometimes it really works.