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14 • Green Project Management

A gallon of gas burned by our cars contributes 19 pounds of carbon
dioxide to the atmosphere. That’s 150 tons a year for a car driving just
15,000 miles.

U.S. Conference of Mayors
Douglas H. Palmer, mayor of Trenton, New Jersey, and president of the U.S.
Conference of Mayors, and Conference Executive Director Tom Cochran
officially launched the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection
Center on February 20, 2007, in recognition of an increasingly urgent need
to provide mayors with the guidance and assistance they need to lead their
cities’ efforts to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are linked to
climate change. Of course the mayors have always been active in promot-
ing policies on a variety of issues, but this center specifically addresses the
need for global climate protection. According to their Web site, this initia-
tive is a “giant step beyond advocacy of a stronger federal role in reducing
emissions.” It drives it down to the local level, just as we are advocating
that the best way to accomplish greenality is to drive the effort down to
the project management level. For further information on the U.S. may-
ors’ efforts, go to http://www.usmayors.org/climateprotection.

Bottom-up demand from Project stakeholders,
sponsors, and Customers
As important as any mandate or guideline is the demand from the stake-
holders, including sponsors and customers. Sometimes it may not be as
clear as a mandate or even a guideline, and is further complicated by con-
flicting goals and objectives. It is an area of primary concentration for
the project manager because, after all, project management is all about
properly setting project expectations and then meeting or exceeding those
expectations. We’ll discuss expectations at length in Section II of the book.
For now, it is important to understand some of the latest demands from
stakeholders, and what influence they have on prospective projects.
Of the many stakeholders in a project, of prime concern is the sponsor
or funding entity, and to a great extent financial institutions are looking
for organizations to be environmentally conscientious. It may be that their
stakeholders, the people like you and me who supply the money that the
banks lend, are being more vigilant about where we want to invest our