For host countries, the Olympics is about far more than sporting feats; it’s a matter of national pride and an opportunity to showcase the country. Cultures, heritage and traditions are for a month under global scrutiny and many previous hosts have commemorated the occasion with extraordinary architectural mementos. London 2012 aimed to go a step further and leverage the high profile and global reach of the event to inspire far-reaching recognition of contemporary sustainability challenges. It was destined to be the ‘greenest Olympics ever’. But to what extent has this been achieved?
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Posts Tagged ‘climate change’
London 2012: Greenest-ever Olympics?
Wednesday, September 26th, 2012Sustainable energy for all – leadership companies join forces
Monday, July 23rd, 2012For all those growing weary of grand proclamations, vision statements and big audacious goals that are made in the face of the world’s many sustainability challenges, consider this one: The United Nations General Assembly declared 2012 the International Year of Sustainable Energy for All, recognising that “…access to modern affordable energy services in developing countries is essential for the achievement of the internationally agreed development goals, including the Millennium Development Goals, and sustainable development, which would help to reduce poverty and to improve the conditions and standard of living for the majority of the world’s population.
All very laudable as a high-level objective, but what does this mean in practice?
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Time to replant the EU Ecolabel flower?
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012I don’t think anyone should be surprised that Tesco has dropped its association with the carbon reduction label. The early reported costs of achieving the label beggared belief – and even with economies of scale, the approach was never going to grow legs. The whole scheme seemed like a pipe dream when it was announced, given the number of products on the average supermarket shelf.
And the problem was not only the reported costs of assessment, but also getting consumers to understand the results. Did we really think that consumers would understand or engage with the idea that 80g of CO2 for a bag of crisps was good or bad?
Let’s also be clear that Tesco has only ditched a carbon label, not a true ‘eco-label’ – i.e. one that seeks to take into account all manner of environmental impacts in a product’s lifecycle. A single issue label was always going to be controversial, particularly being promoted by only one of the big supermarkets looking for green hero status.
What’s the alternative?
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A sea change in the US auto industry?
Friday, January 27th, 2012The word on the street was that the auto industry was dead on its feet not so long ago, but I am not so sure that this is true. My brother has worked with the big automakers most of his career – he returned from Detroit last week saying that the old buzz is back. In the short term at least, the health of the auto industry has always been linked to the health of the economy and this should be good news. But increasing car sales is not always received as positive by the sustainability community.
If you stand back from Big Auto’s marketing messages over recent years, it’s clear how the world has changed. Before the financial crisis, it was business as usual and above-the-line advertising was focused on pushing high performance vehicles and heavy SUVs. Before 2009, respecting the environment remained the preserve of the tree huggers in San Francisco, flaunting their Toyota Prius in a ‘cloud of smug’ (for those of you who watched South Park). But those days are over.
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Save the planet: (Don’t) print this article
Friday, December 16th, 2011We’ve all seen the little messages at the foot of e-mails urging us to ‘save the planet’ by reducing unnecessary printing. The wonders of technology now mean we can send written communications to each other while avoiding the environmental impacts of producing paper and ink and using the energy needed for printing.
Hang on a minute though. Are paper copies necessarily a bad thing? How do we know technology is ‘greener’?
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Marketing is not the panacea
Tuesday, November 29th, 2011Last week was a food sustainability feeding frenzy for me. I participated in three events focusing variously on: food companies and sustainability, the role of marketing, and how to influence consumer behaviour. The first was a breakfast briefing, hosted by our friends at The Futures Company, where I was a panellist. Later that day I attended Unilever’s live webcast update on Sustainable Living hosted by Jonathan Dimbleby. The next day, I spoke at a Footprint Forum event at Innocent’s new HQ in West London, where we looked at sustainability issues and the food service sector. Richard Reed, one of the founders of Innocent, entertained us all with his take on sustainability in his unique business.
All of these events were well organised and the quality of the conversation was unusually high. It’s certainly the case that sustainability and the role of marketing is one of the issues du jour and rightly so. But certain aspects of this debate bemuse me.
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Could carbon accounting offer a solution to the financial crisis?
Thursday, November 24th, 2011I was speaking to a friend Tim Harford, ‘The Undercover Economist’ writer, columnist and presenter, the other day. He said most economists had been taken by surprise by the repeating financial crisis. Watching the events of the last six months unfold has been very revealing. It is not just the economists that seem to have been wrongfooted, it is the politicians, policy makers, regulators and supra-national institutions like the EC.
All of them seem to be flailing around desperately looking for ways to prop up the endless growth-based system that everyone takes for granted as being the only way. You can see the discomfort in their faces, it really is desperate. And the striking thing: no real solutions. The only thing on offer seems to be pumping ever more ‘money’, or liquidity, back into the system through the very channels which caused a great deal of the mess in the first place – the banks and financial institutions. This is like catching a band of robbers and then giving them even more bounty and asking them to redistribute it again to their victims!
I don’t want to get started on the banks, nor even the fundamental difficulties with the principle of endless growth based on finite resources. What I do want to offer is not a fully rounded solution, which would take some serious global coordination on a scale which has never been achieved so far, but moreover an option which could be developed into something workable if the political will was there.
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Why Connecticut v American Electric Power is a boon to US business
Monday, July 11th, 2011The debate over whether increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases were resulting in climate change ended years ago. They are. More recently, the debate over whether humans are the primary cause of climate change also ended. We are.
The debate in the US has recently raged over who has the authority to curtail industrial greenhouse gas emissions – particularly from power generation, the largest source of emissions. Is it the job of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA – the federal regulation agency) or of individual states? Or is it up to companies to voluntarily curtail emissions?
