As a reporter covering business and the environment, I don’t want to let the perfect become the enemy of the good. We should cheer, or at least politely applaud, the small changes that companies make to lighten their environmental footprint. But we ought not to fool ourselves into believing that incremental change is adequate to the tasks ahead—of slowing down climate change, dealing with water issues, or eventually making our economy sustainable.   Today’s Sustainability column looks at changes made by Taco Bell and Fiji Water. You’ll see that I’m unimpressed by what’s happening at Taco Bell. By contrast, Fiji deserves praise for looking deeply and systematically at its environmental impact—but its business model of shipping water across an ocean or two is flawed,

Michael Milken throws a helluva party. His Milken Institute global conference in LA last week attracted such luminaries as Nobel Peace prize winner Muhammad Yunus, human genome sequencer Craig Venter, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and no fewer than four winners of the Nobel prize in economics. Business guys Eric Schmidt, Sam Zell, Eli Broad, Steve Wynn and T. Boone Pickens all spoke, as did tennis great Andre Agassi, music legend Quincy Jones and comedian, writer and actor John Cleese. There was no way to see and hear it all, but here are some things that struck me as interesting… On the U.S. economy: The four Nobel laureates in economics—A. Michael Spence, Myron Scholes, Gary Becker and Edmund “Ned” Phelps—more or less agreed that the economy, while slumping, is not nearly as bad

Interesting partnership announced today—private equity firm KKR joining with Environmental Defense Fund to come up with tools for measuring the environmental footprint of KKR’s portfolio companies. It’s the topic of today’s Sustainability column. Here’s how it begins: Private equity firms are renowned — and occasionally denounced — for squeezing costs out of companies they buy. Their investors say buyout funds help the economy become more efficient, and build shareholder value. Their critics allege that they do so by exploiting workers, avoiding taxes and polluting the planet. We won’t try to settle that argument here, but it provides a useful context for Thursday’s announcement of a partnership between Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, one of the world’s leading buyout firms,

CEO Neville Isdell is an environmentalist, but making The Coca-Cola Co. sustainable is harder than it looks.