In his State of the Union address earlier this year, President Bush outlined his administration’s plans to promote energy independence for America while dramatically improving the environment. His various initiatives include a comprehensive energy plan that promotes energy efficiency and conservation, the development of clean technologies, and the distributed production of energy at home.

As GreenShift approaches the first anniversary of its commencement of operations, I personally found the following quote to be very meaningful:

  “I urge you to pass these measures, for the good of both our environment and our economy. Even more, I ask you to take a crucial step and protect our environment in ways that generations before us could not have imagined. In this century, the greatest environmental progress will come about not through endless lawsuits or command-and-control regulations, but through technology and innovation.”

This is our founding ideal.

We face environmental challenges today that are the collective by-product of several generations of industrial development. At bottom, these challenges do not originate because of this development but rather because of how we, as an economy, use natural resources and manage the by-products of those resources.

We have historically been a consumption driven economy and President Bush is precisely correct – the resolution to these challenges will not come from compulsory changes, to which there will always be resistance, but rather from the increased profits that flow from technology and innovation.

I always use coal as an example; we take coal out of the ground, distribute it to a utility who then burns it to boil steam which then turns a turbine that produces electric current that is then channeled to your light switch. A great deal of our electricity today comes from burning coal. More than 70% of the energy value of that coal today is lost at the power plant and another 20% is lost due to various downstream inefficiencies in the way power is distributed to your light switch. Increasing efficiency, even incrementally, at any point in this flow will reduce costs, reduce the need for virgin coal, and reduce pollution.

GreenShift targets these types of inefficiencies where they exist and uses clean technologies and innovative business practices to enhance production efficiencies, improve resource utilization and minimize waste.

Our goal is to facilitate the rapid realization of transformational environmental gains by enabling and then leveraging the collective actions of a great many people and companies.

We plan to do this by relying on as much of today’s entrenched industrial infrastructure as possible and focusing on delivering incremental advances that enable increased and sustainable profits while favorably impacting compelling environmental challenges and America’s energy independence.

We believe that tremendous environmental gains can be realized simply by making it easier and less costly for people and companies to use clean energy and fuels, to reduce waste and to recycle more.

These incremental shifts forward in both economic and environmental gain – these green shifts – are at the core of what we are about, and they fall within the following clean activities:

  • Clean Energy
  • Clean Fuel
  • Clean Air & Water
  • Clean Production
Underscoring the positive economics of the green shift equation, during 2005, we generated over $1.1 million in net income, we increased our net asset value by over 68% during our first three quarters of operations, and we created the foundation that we needed to grow into our vision. Today, our operating companies generate more than $30 million in annualized revenues and we own over a dozen benchmark clean technologies.