Hunt Green LLC

Last week Pres­i­dent Obama fol­lowed through on a promise to take action to address cli­mate change if Con­gress wouldn’t. Suzanne, along with three other com­men­ta­tors (a solar indus­try exec­u­tive, a pub­lic health spe­cial­ist, and a repub­li­can strate­gist), dis­cussed his plan, the threat of cli­mate change, and what we should do about it in this 20 minute seg­ment.

The UK’s Inde­pen­dent and Media Planet asked Richard Bran­son and Suzanne Hunt to com­ment on the future of renew­able fuel and avi­a­tion in a recent arti­cle.They have been fea­tured together sev­eral times in the press, includ­ing in Time Magazine’s Jet Green arti­cle last year, sub­ti­tled “Air­lines’ need for cheap, plen­ti­ful bio­fuel is forc­ing the indus­try to scale.”

Bran­son acknowl­edged Hunt in his speech to Sec­re­tary Ray Mabus and the US Navy when he dis­cussed their bold lead­er­ship in the tran­si­tion off of petro­leum, his desire to con­tinue col­lab­o­rat­ing, and their shared sense of urgency. The full video of his speech is here.

I almost for­got to men­tion that two of my family’s Hunt Coun­try wines were fea­tured at the Green Inau­gural Ball this year! The farm has been in the fam­ily for seven gen­er­a­tions and my par­ents started the win­ery in 1981. My brother, Jonathan Hunt, is cur­rently the wine­maker and his Dry Ries­ling and Alchemy (a red blend) were fea­tured at the VIP bars at the gala. He and his wife, Car­o­line Boutard Hunt, also pro­duce a spec­tac­u­lar array of organic veg­eta­bles (and chick­ens) that they sell under the name Italy Hill Pro­duce. I got to drink wine from home with long-time friends and col­lab­o­ra­tors includ­ing NASCAR dri­ver and envi­ron­men­tal activist Leilani Munter and her hus­band Craig David­son, Col­orado farmer and 25x25 Board mem­ber, Michael Bow­man (left). And Osprey Orielle Lake (Founder and Pres­i­dent of the Women’s Earth and Cli­mate Cau­cus) and Ann Davlin (Direc­tor of Devel­op­ment for the Car­bon War Room) (right).

I gave an update on the advanced bio­fu­els indus­try and it’s key chal­lenges to defense indus­try col­leagues at this event in April. Among other things we discussed:

- the attempts by Sen­a­tors Inhofe and McCain, and some of their col­leagues in the House, to block the Navy’s work on advanced renew­able fuels;

- Sen­a­tor Mark Udall and oth­ers’ suc­cess­ful efforts to defeat those attacks on the Navy’s efforts to tran­si­tion away from near total depen­dence on petro­leum deriv­a­tives for their planes, ships, ground vehi­cles, etc.

- the Renew­able Fuel Stan­dard weath­ered another storm.

- etc.

I have teamed up with the Inter­na­tional Insti­tute for Sus­tain­abil­ity Anal­y­sis and Strat­egy (IINAS) as one of their asso­ciates. This for­mal­izes the long-standing col­lab­o­ra­tion between myself and the Insitute’s founder, Dr. Uwe Fritsche. IINAS is an inde­pen­dent trans­dis­ci­pli­nary research orga­ni­za­tion based in Darm­stadt (Ger­many) which started oper­at­ing in April 2012. We are cur­rently col­lab­o­rat­ing on a full green­house gas life­cy­cle analy­sis of hydrofrac­tur­ing for nat­ural gas extraction.

Advanced Bio­fu­els Con­fer­ence & Expo. Hous­ton. Novem­ber 2012. We dis­cussed a range of chal­lenges and oppor­tu­ni­ties for the advanced bio­fu­els indus­try includ­ing the need to shift the way the indus­try com­mu­ni­cates about itself. Cre­at­ing a new, cap­i­tal inten­sive, high tech indus­try in today’s eco­nomic cli­mate — while com­pet­ing against existing/entrenched indus­tries — is a mas­sive chal­lenge and the indus­try should be forth­right about that, and should set man­age­able expectations.

I spoke on a keynote panel at the largest annual bio­fuel con­fer­ence in the world mod­er­ated by the UK’s fiercest inter­roga­tor, BBC’s bull­dog, Jeremy Pax­man. World Bio­fu­els Mar­kets, Rot­ter­dam 2012. A video record­ing of an inter­view of me in Rot­ter­dam is online here.

The US Navy has com­mit­ted to reduce its petro­leum use by 50% by 2020 and to sail a Great Green Fleet in 2016. The Air Force set a tar­get of acquir­ing “50% of domes­tic avi­a­tion fuel require­ments via alter­na­tive fuel blends by 2016.” The Air Force and the Army set the goal of increas­ing their “use of renew­able energy to 25% by 2025.” Col­leagues at the Army recently stood up an energy task force to facil­i­tate renew­able energy devel­op­ment on Army bases using third party finance, and the Marines are using solar pan­els and bat­tery packs at for­ward oper­at­ing bases in Afghanistan. It is an honor and a priv­i­lege to col­lab­o­rate with many of the fine peo­ple who are lead­ing this charge.

Thank you to ACORE and to the Lead­er­ship Forum folks for invit­ing me to par­tic­i­pate in the recent U.S. Mil­i­tary and Renew­able Energy Indus­try Forum and the Clean Defense Sum­mit.

I gave the crowd an overview of the renew­able fuels and avi­a­tion work that I am doing at the Car­bon War Room dur­ing the Giga­ton Awards Cer­e­mony in Dur­ban, South Africa in Decem­ber. I talked about the impor­tance of mov­ing away from fos­sil fuels despite the dif­fi­cul­ties in shift­ing sup­ply chains and pro­cure­ment pro­ce­dures, and renew­able avi­a­tion fuels as a means to get the entire advanced renew­able fuels indus­try off the ground (no pun intended). This was a pre­view to the launch of our beta renewablejetfuels.org web­site and the Else­vier beta renew­able fuels data­base a few days later.