A Million Carb-Light Miles Makes Frito-Lay Crave More

That bag of salty snacks in the pantry that blows your daily carb budget is helping Frito-Lay stick to a low-carbon diet. The company's fleet of electric delivery trucks surpassed one million miles this month, part of a drive to cut greenhouse gas emissions and fuel consumption 50 percent by 2020.

The 176 Smith electric trucks have saved the largest snack food maker 200,000 gallons of diesel fuel over the past two years, and Frito-Lay on May 10 ordered 100 more to replace their noisier, polluting cousins.

For all the political cacophony about creating American jobs, reviving housing and boosting manufacturing, there is a surprising dearth of insightful conversation about how the U.S. economy is actually evolving.

If policymakers recognized the scope of this transformation, they might better support the market-based changes already in progress. Into this vacuum comes the book Standing on the Sun by Christopher Meyer, written with Julia Kirby.

Farmers use a cart to haul a load of wheat during a harvest in the village of Fatehganj in Punjab province, Pakistan, on May 3. Pakistan is Asia's third-largest grower of wheat.

Visit www.bloomberg.com/sustainability for the latest from Bloomberg News about energy, natural resources and global business.

Similar to the way a slather of sunscreen can help prevent sunburn, one of its ingredients—titanium oxide—could be injected into the stratosphere to help keep the Earth from overheating, according to a British chemical engineer.

Peter Davidson, former senior innovation adviser to the United Kingdom’s Department of Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, wrote in the May issue of the chemical engineering journal tceToday that TiO2, which is also used in paint and inks, is nontoxic, readily available, and could be a low-cost solution if the planet gets too hot to handle.

U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee, gave his daughter some reasonable advice as she finishes up a program in environmental management at Duke University: “Don’t use that word with a lot of people,” he said. “They won’t know what you’re talking about.”

The word he was talking about is “sustainability,” and while the Senator’s observation is correct, so was his daughter’s response: Well, they know what it means at the university, and corporate executives do, too. It's a global company's long-term strategy to thrive amid unprecedented change in population growth, middle-class consumption and resource availability.

(Cross-posted from Bloomberg.com's Political Capital blog.)

Keep an eye out tomorrow for an announcement from the Commerce Department, which is expected to slap tariffs on imports of some Chinese solar products.

The Department of Energy would continue to be barred from enforcing new energy efficiency standards for incandescent light bulbs under a planned House amendment that pits bulb manufacturers against the tea party movement.

The amendment, which Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) has vowed to introduce to an upcoming appropriations bill, would prohibit funding to enforce standards that require the 100-watt light bulb, and eventually other bulbs, to be about 30 percent more efficient.

Utilities could burn world coal reserves to the last lump without worrying climate activists, if there were some kind of carbon flypaper to catch greenhouse gases before they joined the atmosphere.

Industry has used ammonia compounds to capture carbon dioxide for food-and-beverage use for years. Global efforts to implement carbon capture and underground storage have stalled, but scientific research into potentially better, cheaper technologies continues.

Raw rubber seen during the drying process at the Bunut Rubber Factory, operated by PT Bakrie Sumatera Plantations, in Kisaran, North Sumatra, Indonesia, on April 26. Bakrie Sumatera is a unit of PT Bakrie & Brothers, the Indonesian family palm-oil-to-property empire founded in 1942.

Visit www.bloomberg.com/sustainability for the latest from Bloomberg News about energy, natural resources and global business.

Planet Forward’s Frank Sesno discusses the growing challenge of keeping water clean. He reports on Bloomberg Television’s “Bloomberg West.” (Source: Bloomberg)

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