[Jake Whitcomb ’06 and Andy Rossmeissl ’05]
By Christopher Shaw
If the thought of global climate change is too much for you to absorb, you’re not alone. With bills to pay, mouths to feed, kids to clothe, who really has time to build a biofuel gasifer? Or extra cash to pay for solar panels?
Economics Professor John Isham has you in mind. In his Environmental Economics class in 2005, Isham challenged his students to develop a way to take the burden of alleviating climate change off the shoulders of individuals. Give people a means to effect positive change effortlessly, he said, and allow the market to act.
Two students, Jake Whitcomb, a junior art and ES major, and Andy Rossmeissl, a senior in pre-Architecture, took up his charge to begin a credit card company that would mitigate some of the harmful effects of normal economic activity, that would in fact “internalize externalities” in the jargon of environmental economics—that is, make the price of an item reflect it’s overall cost to the planet and, maybe, reverse the consequences of its manufacture and use.
Three years later, Bright Planet, as Whitcomb and Rossmeissl’s business soon came to be known, is poised to launch its first commercially available credit card, with a CEO, strong bank and corporate support, and a number of investors from Middlebury’s alumni network.
Brightcard, as it will be called, works by taking a penny from every dollar the purchaser spends and investing it in the development of a carbon neutral energy technology such as wind turbines, biofuels or solar panels, a process generally known as buying carbon “offsets.” For instance, from your $437.00 Brightcard purchase of airline tickets to South Padre Island (to study turtle nesting sites, say) $4.37 will be invested in a technology that reduces (or has the potential to reduce) the amount of carbon dioxide your flight will generate. Presumably your investment will have a multiplicative effect down the road.
The idea plays off a credit card concept worked out by previous organizations such as Working Assets. You can also buy offsets outright from a number of different outlets on the Internet. It’s not a perfect system, however.
“There has been a lot of concern about transparency,” Whitcomb said, when I met him and Andy Rossmeissl at Carol’s Hungry Mind Café in Middlebury. “Previously, buyers of offsets had no way of knowing whether their purchase was going toward something with an actual potential for change, like solar, or toward hydrogen, for instance, which is going nowhere.” Bright Planet, he assured me, had contracted to buy all of its offsets with Native Energy, Inc., of Charlotte, Vermont, where you could actually track how your money was spent on its Web site.
“Native Energy does all its work in a few Inuit village in the Arctic,” Rossmeissl told me, where local interest in global warming is high due to the drastic changes in animal migration, sea currents, and ice patterns. The villages derive all their electricity and heating fuel from the local oil tank, which is replenished once a year by an ocean-going tanker when the ice melts. When Native Energy helps a village build a wind generator, for instance, “You can actually measure the amount of carbon your dollar is keeping out of the atmosphere.” Native Energy was named the best source for offsets by Tufts University, Rossmeissl added. “It’s also local.”
Whitcomb and Rossmeissl had just returned from meetings in Philadelphia with a major investor. “There was a lot of excitement in the room,” Whitcomb said, not only for their finely honed business plan and record of attracting investment, but from the impact of a warm January on public awareness.
From Carol’s we went upstairs to Bright Planet’s office on the second floor of Middlebury’s Battell Building, where you could see the late-arriving first snow covering the village green across the street. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth had just been nominated for the Academy Award it would eventually get. A wave was breaking, and it seemed the Bright Planet founders were riding it.
The office was low-key and comfortable, with leftover computers and printers from student days jury-rigged for corporate duty, and brick and board bookshelves. There were old wooden cross-country skis on display, attesting to their owners’ strong attachment to the northern climate and Whitcomb’s former position as captain of the Middlebury cross-country ski team.
Andy Rossmeissl and I had met a year or so ago at a dinner before a speech by James Howard Kunstler. At the time, Rossmeissl was a senior and working for three or four days a week as personal assistant to Robert Kennedy Jr. Bright Planet was in its infancy. After graduating he worked for four months for Kennedy’s Water Keeper Alliance, then drove north to Middlebury to start Bright Planet with a few hundred bucks in his pocket and an old couch in a U-Haul. It sounded like a classic American origin story.
While I was listening Whitcomb handed me a prototype of one of their bright orange plastic cards. Middlebury, he said, the town and the College, had been a huge part of the equation for them. “It’s the best place in the U.S. to be working on global warming right now,” he told me. He cited the Sunday Night Group and people like Isham and John Elder. Then he added, “Where else can you walk up the street any time you want and talk to Bill McKibben?”
Christopher Shaw teaches writing in the English Department and is the associate director of the Middlebury Fellowships in Environmental Journalism.