Amit Chatterjee: How to Make a City Sustainable

Amit Chatterjee, the CEO and founder of Hara Technologies, consults with companies all across the country about how to go green. He stopped by Big Think recently to talk about his work on the city of Palo Alto, California, in which he helped make the 60,000 resident municipality to more sustainable—and saved them a substantial amount of money in the process.

What were some of the changes implemented? Chatterjee says that Palo Alto’s chief of police looked at his department and zeroed in on the air conditioning in the Canine Unit. “He realized that if I could turn off the HVAC and put on fans, the dogs would see no change, but I would no longer have to be reliant on HVACs to cool that system.” According to Chatterjee, because of Hara’s improvements, the city of Palo Alto has seen between $600k-$800k in savings each year.

Chatterjee also talks about the idea of a tax on carbon, and what questions we should be asking ourselves before endorsing the idea. “The first is: is it actually a meaningful proxy for natural resources consumed? Secondly, what’s the emotional tie to it? And thirdly, whether it’s feasible. Whether or not organizations should be able to deal with it.”