I have always been sceptical of the argument that multi-function devices like smart phones are eco-friendly by avoiding the need for a stack of equivalent individual devices (in this case MP3 players, digital cameras, wrist watches etc). I have an iPhone which did stop me purchasing a voice recorder for the interviews for The Green Executive (there was an app for that), but I already had an iPod, a digital compact camera, a watch etc, etc so the phone hasn't offset the purchases of those devices (although I am less likely to upgrade them in future).
But, for the younger generations at least, this now seems to be changing. They are increasingly living their lives around a single device. To take one example of the commercial impact of this, sales of point and click cameras were down a staggering 30% last year - a fall attributed to the use of camera phones, and no wonder - you take the picture, edit it and upload it to Facebook with just a few taps on that slick touchscreen. Even my dad has started reading the morning news on his phone, and smart phones are said to be the guitar tuner of choice amongst the younger bands.
It is probably just old fogeys like me who have spent long enough in the analogue age to have accumulated so much electronic baggage. The younger generations do not need to have as much physical stuff as we did - whether cameras, magazines or stacks of CDs - and that can only be a good thing. It is also a trend which business needs to take cognisance of - or they could end up in the same dire straits as Kodak.
I was watching BBC's Daily Politics on Monday to catch the latest on the RBS bonus affair that I had just blogged on, and, lo, there was an item on responsible capitalism. They focussed on B&Q, an excellent example of responsible business, but fell into the old trap of thinking the scope of corporate social responsibility begins and ends with supporting the local community. But then, in the interests of balance, up popped a chap from the Adam Smith Institute to declare that CSR was "a tax on the consumer."
Deep breath.
Count to ten.
This is the economics of Milton Friedman - that the only responsibility of an business is to maximise profits for shareholders. Well, we're still living with the consequences of that sort of thinking - the sub prime bubble, Ponzi-style financial "products", bank crashes, debt crises, the age of austerity etc, etc. Throughout history, unrestrained markets - in this case financial markets - have bubbled and burst with painful consequences - not least to the shareholders that Friedman claims should be put first, second and last. Left to itself, Adam Smith's famous invisible hand sometimes punches us in the face.
Let's face facts. Business operates in society, society exists in the environment. To state the bleedin' obvious, businesses - and therefore the supply side of the economy - are made up of people. The demand side of the economy is made up of people. Business is a social issue, people delivering value to people in return for financial reward. You can't get away from that.
And even from a narrowly financial point of view, CSR is good business. Marks & Spencer has made a tidy profit on Plan A, doing the "heavy lifting" on environmental and social issues on behalf of their customers who clearly see that as added value rather than an added cost. B&Q is the fourth largest home improvement chain in the world, so their environmental and social projects have hardly held them back. Procter & Gamble is the highest ranked consumer goods company on the Forbes Global 2000 list, yet they give away their water purification product for free to people in developing countries.
As a consumer I buy from all three because of that added value. And would you rather have shares in a responsible, successful business like these as opposed to worthless shares in an irresponsibly crashed bank?
The title of this post is tongue-in-cheek, by the way. I'm not saying the guys at the Adam Smith Institute are stupid, in fact they are possibly a little too clever to fully understand the real world around them. A little less IQ and a little more EQ (emotional intelligence) might set them in better stead.
The BusinessGreen webcast on customer behaviour went really well on Monday. The recorded version will be online soon and I'll put the link in the comments below. I'm not going to summarise the sessions in detaiul here as you will be able to watch it, but instead I'll pull out some key messages from the participants.
Sophie Flak of hotel group Accor (Sofitel, Novotel, Formule1) emphasised the need to use facts rather than following the crowd or to "think twice before acting" as she put it.
Carmel McQuaid of Marks & Spencer emphasised that the green message must be fully integrated into mainstream marketing. So M&S uses the same models (Danii, Twiggy et al) for their green campaigns as their normal advertising - and they sync their "clear out days" to promote the recycling of clothes with their seasonal changes in stock.
My main point was to put yourself in the customers shoes. You need to make green behaviour as frictionless as possible while adding friction to the less green behaviour - exactly the same principle to promote green behaviour within your organisation.
We got some great questions, too.
One was about the message you use. All the panellists agreed that preaching was counterproductive. I suggested that humour was a good option, such as replacing the po-faced "Consider the environment before printing this e-mail" with a wittier version like "Printing this e-mail will make Al Gore cry."
Another was along the lines of "is greening products enough or do we not need a different type of economy?" My response was that it was already happening in certain areas - music, books, movies where people were increasingly buying the service rather than the equivalent physical artefact, but that in others it was difficult as many people see a product such as a car as a sign of status - which is why many car clubs are targetting the second car rather than the first one.
The most worrying was about the 'cost downside' of doing all this. I was quite blunt and pointed out that study after study had shown that companies who took sustainability seriously were doing better in the downturn than average (acknowledging that cause and effect weren't completely clear).
I'm writing this on the East Coast Mainline, charging across the frozen fields of eastern England as the sun casts various tints of orange across the monochrome landscape. I'm on my way down to the bright lights of London to take part on a webinar about engaging customers on how to use your products and services in a greener way. The event is organised by BusinessGreen.com, sponsored by Accor and also includes Marks & Spencer, so I'm in pretty good company.
If you read this in time, you can still sign up here - I'll post a summary on Wednesday for all those who missed it!
Just to give some background - customer engagement is one of the three big challenges for green business I identified back in December. Effectively all those green collar jobs everyone hopes says will emerge from the green economy will be delivering products and services which allow others to go greener. This is the top level of the business case model in my book, the Green Executive. So why is this such a big issue?
Well look at the diagram below (taken from The Green Executive) which shows lifecycle carbon emissions for a variety of generic products - computer, car, food and washing powder - which:
Food is the only common example I could find where the emissions from the use phase (in this case cooking at home) don't dominate the lifecycle. In the case of food this is because of the huge amount of energy required for fertiliser, pesticides and irrigation. But for the other three, the biggest element of the emissions is in the hands of the user.
The washing powder data above came from Procter & Gamble and was the evidence that drove them to create Ariel Excel Gel which allows washing at 15°C - a massive potential improvement in lifecycle emissions. But that improvement hinges on the consumer being able/wanting to wash at that temperature. First up, my A+ rated washing machine doesn't have a 15°C setting and secondly, (on the rare occasions I put a wash on) I'm forever turning the dial from 40°C down to 30°C - the fairies turn it back up when I turn my back. Marks & Spencer may have run a massive "Wash at 30°C" campaign on their clothes, but there is a residual feeling amongst many consumers that warmer = cleaner.
So you can (and must) enable greener behaviour, you can (and must) inform the consumer/customer of the benefits, but that's often not enough to actually change their behaviour. We'll look at that in part 2.
There's disappointing news from the world of low emission vehicles (LEVs) - while sales of all cars were up 10% last year in the US, alternatively fuelled vehicles (incl hybrids) only rose 2.3%. In the UK, however, road fuel sales were down. This broadly suggests that people are simply driving less rather than investing a premium in a vehicle which would cost less to run overall. But it may also be fear of the new - will that electric car run out of charge half way down the M1?
The relationship between green products of any type and consumers has always been complicated - for example organic food dominates baby food sales but not 'adult food' - we're happy to eat cheap crap ourselves but won't feed it to our kids. There are many reasons for consumers being lukewarm on green products:
Habit/comfort zone
Costs - perceived or otherwise
Perceived low quality
Lack of understanding/fear that a new system will be complicated
I've argued for a long time that it is retail which is acting as a gatekeeper for fast moving consumer goods. Their huge buying power can both drive innovation, ensure quality and keep costs reasonable. The consumer can then trust the retailer to get it right on their behalf.
But what for other sectors? The golden rule is to put yourself in your customers' shoes. If you are aiming for a green niche then you can compromise on performance or price for a very green product. However if you want to go mainstream, you must compete on performance, price and planet.
Of course the ultimate goal is a green product that people deeply desire. MP3s and e-Books aren't marketed as green, but they are - and they sell in their millions. It may be that the auto industry needs to go through another couple of iterations before they hit that level of customer pull for LEVs - after all one technology has dominated the industry for 120 years and that it take some shifting.
If going green is a Herculean task in itself, it is one with three massive challenges, just like Cerberus the three headed dog (who looks a bit of a poodle in this classic woodcut, but never mind). Those three slavering jaws that could wreck your efforts are:
1. The Supply Chain
For most organisations, the supply chain is the biggest part of your carbon/ecological footprint. With complex, global chains, it is very hard to trace where materials and components come from. For example, huge number of big brands have black-listed paper giant APP for their destruction of rainforest, but the company hasn't gone bust, so it is almost certain its products are finding their way to the consumer through some circuitous route. Likewise if you want to develop greener products or install greener technologies, you will often find the supply chains are weak - low quality, high prices, low reliability. This will change over time as demand rises, but it is currently a serious brake on progress.
2. Company Culture
It is very telling that at least 80% of my work this year has involved engaging with clients' staff to get their buy-in to sustainability. Without that buy-in - from the boardroom table to the guy sweeping the yard - green programmes will stall. This is where real leadership and hard graft are required - it is not easy. (Don't forget to check out my guide to fostering green behaviour at work.)
3. Consumer Behaviour
Whether you are selling houses, kettles or washing powders, the biggest factor that will determine their environmental impact is how they are used by the consumer (or other end user). Proctor & Gamble may have developed Ariel Excel Gel (aka Tide Coldwater) which will wash clothes at 15°C, but all their work will be in vain if the consumers' dials drift back up to 40°C. A zero carbon house won't be a zero carbon house if the doors are left open in mid-winter with an electric fire blazing in every room. Persuading those people to buy your green product and then use it correctly is a function of marketing, product design and clever messaging.
Big challenges indeed - worthy of a true superhero. Hercules used strength, guile and determination to complete his tasks - virtues required of the successful green business leader, too.
About 15 years ago I lived in Hanger Lane in West London. One weekend I was left unsupervised, so I tootled off on my bike to a hill I could see in the distance and looped back around home via a river. Suddenly a magical sight appeared before my eyes - a traditional shopping street with a butcher, a baker, no candlestick maker, alas, but the independent bookshop, fishmongers and deli more than made up for that. Not a chain store in sight. Wow!
I haven't been back to Pitshanger Lane (for that was the name of this retail Narnia) since, so I don't know how it has fared, but that's what I immediately thought of when I read The Portas Review on revitalising the highstreet by the eponymous TV retail guru Mary Portas.
The Review is part of the UK Government's attempt to get the economy going again, by getting people back into town centres. There's some good stuff in it too - all designed to open up the high streets to smaller, more specialist retailers.In my view, the very dominance of big retail on the highstreet has made it vulnerable to e-commerce - why trudge around identikit big sheds if you can find the same stuff online?
To me the world economy looks like one of those cheesy sci-fi movies where an alien disease threatens to wipe out mankind, but medical science is stumped for an answer. Robert Peston's brilliant The Party's Over: How the West Went Bust on BBC2 demonstrated that debt-fuelled consumerism and financial Ponzi schemes are unlikely to get us back to the boom of the mid 90s to the mid 00s. Added to this are determinedly high oil prices and rise wages in the countries to which we have outsourced much of our production, which makes cheap tat much less cheap than it once was.
So can we harness this situation as an opportunity? Can we use the perilous position of the highstreet as an opportunity, not just for a revival of small shops a la Portas, but as a revival of small scale, local, sustainable supply chains? The modern cottage industry can be high tech and lean, able to offer quality and uniqueness, selling products that people cherish, rather than the semi-disposable cheap rubbish of yore. Loops could be closed, creating local supplies of sustainable materials.
There is still space for big shed in my utopian vision, but as actual sheds - warehouses for e-commerce, reaping the sustainability benefits of this type of business and using the local "Post Office" points Portas suggests could store deliveries that come while you are out.
Who knows if it will work, but as in those sci-fi movies, the hero usually just tries lots of stuff before he stumbles on what saves the day.
A week or so ago my other half proudly presented me with a new kettle. "Look!" she said "It's an eco-friendly one!" And sure enough it was slathered in claims it would save 66% energy.
"Mmm", I thought, putting on my electrical engineer's hat (which is admittedly a bit dusty), "A heating element is 100% efficient, the heat capacity of water is constant, the heating time is so quick you won't get significant losses through the sides, so what could possibly be 66% more efficient?"
The answer is, with a flat element and a gauge that lets you see if you have a single cup of water inside, you can save energy by only boiling the amount if water you need. When I explained this to her, she felt she had been conned. We ended up having a long conversation about greenwash.
Here's the evidence as I see it:
For the prosecution:
An intelligent, but busy person (she has a PhD and two small kids) assumed that the kettle itself was 66% more efficient, because she's not enough of a green geek to pore over the details;
The savings are almost entirely dependent on the user (and the user frequently making single cups of tea/coffee);
The kettle hasn't changed much - probably the most significant thing was the sticker on it about energy - now gone;
As flat element kettles are getting more common, anyone could measure out a cup of water. Even with a traditional element kettle, you can use less water with a bit of care.
For the defence:
The labels clearly said that the savings would be down to you being able to use less water;
The nature of a kettle is such that the amount of water is the key factor in energy consumption;
Philips are bringing the water factor to the attention of the user;
The 66% figure came from a DEFRA study, so has third party validation.
So, you, the jury, what verdict would you give? Guilty, or not guilty?
I spent a very pleasant evening on Friday listening to Chris Packham at a Northumberland Wildlife Trust fundraiser (he's vice-president of the Wildlife Trusts). He may be 50 now, Packham retains all the enthusiasm, charisma and rebelliousness of the days when I watched him present The Really Wild Show back in the late 80s - and he isn't afraid to mince his words.
He started his talk with photos he had taken of Siberian tigers in the snow. This took him to the conservation of these beautiful animals and the shocking figures that a tiger is worth $100,000 to the poacher that shoots it, and $300,000 to the guy illegally selling its parts for medicine in China.
He went on to berate what he called "the tiger conservation industry" for hoovering up huge amounts of money, but failing to even slow the decline of the tiger. "The only thing I've seen that works is eco-tourism", he said "You've got to make the tiger worth more alive than dead to local people."
This is something I passionately believe in. In my opinion, much 'charity' is at best ineffectual and often makes serious problems worse - in effect when we sign a cheque we are buying a feeling of "having done something". If you look at international development, the third world countries which are breaking through like India are doing it by entrepreneurialism, not by accepting charitable handouts which can undermine local markets, trapping people in poverty. (If you are interested in this way of thinking, you must read "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid" by JK Prahalad - and before anybody gets angry, I'm not including disaster relief in this critique).
Bringing it closer to home, when I started in this career, a surprising number of businesses expected to be given environmental advice for "free" - paid for by the taxpayer in other words. For many years this was what I did - delivering projects where the beneficiary wasn't writing the cheque. Something I noticed early on was that the "free" advice I gave was rarely if ever acted upon, not because it wasn't any good, but because it was seen as free and wasn't valued. Thankfully we have largely thrown off the shackles of publicly funded business support and the bulk of Terra Infirma's turnover is now earned from those who are directly benefiting from our skills, experience and knowledge. We charge them quite a lot of money for this and guess what? Our clients value what we do.
Another great example is the explosion of solar energy in countries which enact feed-in tariffs, creating a market for small generators and undermining the monopolies of the big generators. Those markets are doing more to ramp up renewable energy than virtually any other attempt I can think of.
The free market is by no means perfect, but I believe in working with what we've got. The challenge is can you harness markets for good? Can you make 'good' financially worthwhile and 'bad' expensive?
Despite the fact I've been working "in the environment" for over a decade, I still get surprised at how fearful people are of sustainable solutions.
To take an example, I subscribe to a mailing list of professional engineering consultants. A debate sprung up about wind power and intermittency - a valid and serious concern. I posted that we needed smart grids to balance supply and demand. The immediate response from one poster was that he'd never let an electricity company cut his house off from the grid. I had to quickly respond that no-one to my knowledge had ever considered this, but I was very surprised that an educated person would jump to the conclusion that this kind of intrusion would be the result.
There is a human tendency to fear change. And our media has a terrible tendency to play on those fears - witness the repeated exaggeration of the cost of Chris Huhne's energy reforms: free market "think tank" says £500 per house per year, regulator Ofgem says £90 - which figure do you think gets repeated again and again? Is it a surprise that people fear the worst?
I think this fear is simply a desire to stick with what we know. And while it is a good idea to keep promoting the positives of tackling, say, climate change - energy security, cleaner local air, cheaper bills (in time) - experience suggests that a significant chunk of the public will still find something to fear.
Instead I think we have to look at societal revolutions that have happened - for example the internet. No-one ever argued for the internet becoming so prevalent in our lives. It happened because people liked it. They liked having all that information at their fingertips, they liked being able to download books and music, they liked being able to keep in touch with their relatives around the world without the dreaded Xmas letter.
So how do we do this with sustainability? The internet is providing some - music, movies and books shifted by electrons rather than atoms - people like the convenience. Feed In Tariffs make householders want to install renewables to generate some cash - people like that. The congestion charge and differentiated road tax encourage people to buy low emission vehicles - people like the access and the lower costs.
It is solutions like these where we offer people options, which are not obligatory but desirable, that will tip the balance in the sustainability direction. People have to want to do it - if you bear that in mind then much more effective solutions will follow.
For years those of us in the green consumer niche have been conscientiously buying eco-products from Ecover, Bodyshop, Natural Collection etc etc - and feeling very self-righteous for doing so. Only problem is, we only represent 5-15% of consumers - the rest are either oblivious to green products or are actively suspicious of them, believing that they'll be expensive and won't work.
To achieve sustainability, we need every company to be a green company and every product to be a green product. There are two routes to this goal. The first is to try to persuade the 85-95% majority of consumers to 'see the light' and start buying green(er) products. Just one problem - go and stand in the middle of your high street or local megamarket, even in these economically straightened times, and watch how much and what people buy - how on earth are you going to change all their minds?
The second approach is to green mainstream products without asking the consumer's permission. Take Procter & Gamble, owners of the Ariel (UK) and Tide (US) brands. They launched a green range of household products in the 1990s but they didn't sell so they withdrew the products. Now P&G are re-engineering mainstream products to deliver on performance, price AND planet. Look at Ariel Excel Gel (aka Tide Coldwater) above - the packaging barely mentions the environment but check out that 15°C on the front - that makes it arguably much greener than the Ecover equivalent. Oh, and it was rated best clothes washing product ever by Which? magazine.
Or take Marks & Spencer who are producing mainstream products made of recycled PET like my umbrella (right). Again, I could have bought this without realising it was an 'eco-product' - it's just an M&S brolly and it does the job as well as any other.
This mainstreaming strategy is clearly the best way to get most people buying greener products. From the consumer's point of view it has a great additional benefit - it forces the producers of such products to deliver on price and performance too as they can't rely on the niche paying a premium price or tolerating mediocre performance. This banishes complacency, drives innovation and brings sustainable products to everyone - whether they want a 'green' product or not.
So, I would argue, the eco-product is dead, long live the eco-product!
Two pieces of news caught my eye yesterday: the big news that UK Energy & Climate Change Minister Chris Huhne announced that the UK Government was committing to a 50% reduction in carbon emissions by 2027 - the toughest target set in the world - and some local news that an aluminium smelter and its coal fired power station - both about 15 miles from where I'm sitting - might close due to the Government's new carbon floor price.
There's a big problem here - the aluminium produced by the smelter (and associated carbon emissions) will still be produced somewhere in the world, just not here. The global climate doesn't care where the emissions come from, so there is a strong possibility that the Government's commitment will simply push more industry and emissions overseas. If you don't believe me, figures from Oxford University show that, despite the official Government line for many years, the UK has not been cutting its carbon emissions, but has simply leaked them to other countries while our overall carbon footprint has continued to grow.
If I was a right-wing commentator I would now start harrumphing about the idiocy of carbon emission restrictions, how they're destroying our Great British Industry and how we should drop the whole bally lot. But that's a stupid argument - first of all it ends with The Tragedy of the Commons (ie we all lose through selfishness) and, secondly, in a globalised economy it is our Western consumption levels that drive global emissions and we can't duck responsibility for that.
What we need to do instead is develop a smarter way of dealing with each country's emissions - considering emissions from our consumption as well as our production. A few years ago I explained this to both the then UK climate minister, David Miliband, and the current one, Chris Huhne. Both listened politely, did some mulling on it and acknowledged my point, but I suspect both filed it in the 'too difficult' tray.
Business is way ahead of Government here. About five years ago many, if not most, major companies only considered emissions from within their factory fence (plus those from power stations producing their electricity). Most have now faced up to the fact that their carbon footprint does include that of the suppliers - it was crazy when say Tesco, whose purchasing power is driven by £1 in every 8 we Brits spend, didn't acknowledge responsibility for supply chain emissions. Now Tesco and the other big retail sheds, along with major consumer goods manufacturers like P&G and Unilever, are actively decarbonising their supply chain wherever that supply chain may be - national boundaries are no restriction. Some are looking the other way along the supply chain too and 'choice editing' for the consumer, such as when B&Q stopped selling patio heaters. I suspect the massive buying power of such powerful companies could have more impact than any Government targets.
I'm not a mainstream environmentalist for one very good reason - like any tribe, you need to sign up to a set of beliefs that are taken as gospel, but are often over-simplistic when you're dealing with the real world. One of these beliefs is "Brands are bad" - brands are a symbol of consumerism and consumerism is killing the planet.
Well, yes and no. If you look the average Joe or Joanne's carbon footprint it is dominated by the mundane - heating our homes, getting around, cooking, eating, lighting. With the exception of booze and soft drinks, these markets aren't dominated by brands - no-one buys mains gas from one company because it has a better brand - and it's all the same gas at the end of the day. You get on the train that's at the station, rather than waiting for your favourite brand - you might specify a train provider because it is more comfortable or has wifi, but not because of the brand. The choice of petrol for your car is usually made on price and convenience factors rather than Shell, BP or Esso (unless you are actively boycotting one).
But let's go onto consumer goods and look a what a brand is. Why do companies develop brands? Because they add intangible value to the products. That value has no carbon footprint - it is ephemeral. That intangible value is an aspect of human nature - we want stuff that makes us feel good whether it's a designer label or an extremely expensive bicycle.
From an environmental point of view, it is actually better for a consumer to spend £300 on a pair of designer jeans (and look after them) than blow the same amount in a cheap highstreet clothing store and chuck the clothes when they get the slightest bit of wear and tear. Likewise, a posh champagne has roughly the same carbon footprint as a bog standard bottle of cava (and certainly less than the equivalent bottles you could buy for the same money), yet the former is seen as consumerism and the latter, not. It doesn't make sense.
Branding can be a force for good. Many of the companies that are leading the way in going green are doing it to protect and enhance their brand. Marks & Spencer, Timberland and Apple spring to mind. Others like Body Shop, Patagonia and Natural Collection are brands which were founded with green/ethcis in mind. So never feel guilty about working for, developing or purchasing a big brand - there's nothing immoral about it. Just make it a green brand and watch that intangible value grow even higher!
Great news in the Guardian this morning that the EU is to end the incredibly wasteful practice of fish discards. This is the situation where fishermen could catch however many fish they want, but can only land a certain number, so the rest are thrown back - usually dead. This is worse than landing them where at least they would be put to good use - and would offset other food production.
The story illustrates a number of important points:
The power of perverse incentives - fisherman are currently encouraged to be wasteful;
The risk of unintended consequences - the landing quota was introduced to try and protect fish stocks but has arguably made the situation worse;
The stultifying effect of institutional inertia - everybody has known discarding fish is a problem, yet it has taken decades to actually do anything.
These are three potential pitfalls that all of us in the sustainability world come up against some time or other, whether in communities, organisations or in international policy. Watch out for them!
No, not living in the sky like that city at the end of The Empire Strikes Back where Harrison Ford gets immobilised in chocolate. Have you ever:
Rented a CD or DVD?
Borrowed a book from a Library?
Used a car club?
Watched a movie on demand?
Downloaded MP3s?
Shared garden tools with your neighbours?
If 'yes' then you've done a bit of "cloud living" according to this month's Wired magazine (article not available online). This is a snappy new term for a business strategy I've been promoting for years - product-service systems - delivering the service required by consumers without giving them ownership of a tangible product. This has significant environmental benefits - downloading an album on MP3 saves 40-80% of the carbon of buying a CD. The cloud analogy has been borrowed from 'cloud computing' - where all software and storage is on-line and your computer is simply a portal to the cloud (eg Google Docs). 'Cloud living' is a more attractive term than 'product-service system' and it also has the perspective of the consumer rather than the producer which propel it into the public arena.
Only one problem - if you google the term itself, it also means people who make money off the internet (selling ebooks etc) without any fixed base - allowing them to pursue the lifestyle they want (surfing, snow boarding and other cool things). Of course these are two are different sides (production/consumption) of the same coin, but as always it will take time to determine whether the consumption element of cloud living sticks.
I'm writing this on Sunday evening as I'll be looking after an ill child on Monday morning when this post will go live. I've just watched Stephen Fry and Mark Carwardine's programme about the aftermath of the BP oilspill. They ascertained fairly easily that despite many assurances from many people, pundits and at one point BP itself, that at least 75% of the oil is still in the water - it is only the 25% we can see that has been cleared up - and the dispersant used to achieve that may be as bad as the oil itself.
Where the intrepid pair diverged in their opinion is the blame. Fry took the attitude that it is society's demand for oil that makes companies like BP attempt to drill for oil in such hostile environments, and the company was trying its best to rectify the situation as it possibly could. Carwardine's attitude was that a company raking in such vast profits was fully responsible and were trying to put the best spin on the limited clean up they can actually do.
So who is right?
In my opinion they both are. Dividing society into producers and consumers is a false construct. We are all people whether we are premier league footballers, street sweepers or pensioners. We all consume and we all rely on production for income one way or another*. We can't divide the two and point the finger. Business has responsibility to society and society has responsibility to the planet. If both fulfilled that responsibility properly, the world would be a much better place.
* unless you live in a yurt in the wilderness and forage for roots.
It is said that the advent of the transistor killed off all the old valve manufacturers. They stood still and got wiped out by the new upstarts with their fancy new technology. The same could, and probably will, happen with the Low Carbon Economy - FTSE 100 packaging manufacturer Bunzl is having to shift its focus away from single use plastic bags in light of the many attempts to phase them out. You gotta move with the times...
I attended an excellent seminar at Newcastle University last Friday. Professor Tim Jackson was the keynote speaker and the reason why I was there – reading his 1996 book ‘Material Concerns’ on the problems of and solutions to unsustainable production was a turning point in my understanding of this subject. The book is now out of print, but is well worth tracking down on the second hand market.
Prof Jackson has now moved on to the consumption side of the sustainability equation. He presented ‘the economic dilemma’:
Economic growth in GDP is related to ecological damage, but, below a very low threshold, is not related to quality of life;
Falling or unstable GDP is related to a drop in quality of life.
He demonstrated that there has been no global decoupling of resource use and economic growth (any national decoupling is simply due to the offshoring of resource use). His conclusion was that we needed a new economic system of zero growth.
In the Q&A;, I asked him whether this would be more difficult than decoupling as in my view we hadn’t really tried to decouple the two. His view was that some decoupling was possible, but probably not to the degree required. I'm still not convinced that inventing a new economic system would be any easier.
Warning: don't be fooled by the cute sunflower on the cover, or the modest page count, John Ehrenfeld's Sustainability by Designis the most intellectually rigorous treatment of sustainability that I have ever come across.
Ehrenfeld's diagnosis of the earth's problems is that we have become addicted to Having. The addiction analogy is a great one - we want more and more stuff even though we know that getting any of it will not satisfy us for long and only make us crave more. He then uses systems theory to argue that eco-efficiency, corporate social responsibility and (the standard view* of) sustainable development won't get us out of this addiction.
Instead he proffers and deconstructs a new definition of sustainability as "the possibility that humans and other life will flourish on the Earth forever". In particular the word 'flourish' is included to force home the idea that sustainability is not just a lack of unsustainability, but much more ambitious and positive than that. Drawing on the work of thinkers such as Heidegger, Fromm and Maturana, he argues we must move from our addiction to Having to a state of Being. To this we need to disrupt our current patterns of behaviour and he gives a range of examples of how that might be achieved.
The simplest of these is the two button toilet flush. By providing a decision point (high volume or low volume flush?) this product makes us stop and question why would we want to use more or less water and therefore links us (however briefly) to the natural world and the pressures upon it. He calls this disruption of our habits and routine by products 'presencing'. The disruption principle is also applied to the design of organisations and governance structures. Of course Ehrenfeld cannot provide all the answers within a 215 page book, but this work provides a context and springboard for the next generation of sustainable solutions.
Despite the approachable and open writing style, this a challenging read as it covers a lot of ground very quickly and the philosophical and linguistic concepts behind the arguments can be hard to grasp if you are coming to them for the first time as I was. It certainly disrupted my thinking on sustainability and has given me a deeper understanding of the principles - particularly on the consumption side of the coin.
In short: quite brilliant, but be prepared for an intensive intellectual workout!
* I define sustainable development as the process of achieving sustainability (so this work would be part of that process), but Ehrenfeld uses the standard definitions (eg meeting today's needs without compromising the needs of future generations).
Last week I made reference to the 'rebound effect'. I like to illustrate this concept with a little story. Back in December 2003, I wrote off my Ford Ka in a smallish prang. I replaced it with a Golf TDi, for two reasons:
a. I want to have the option of using biodiesel (but that's another story...).
b. It did 55mpg compared with the Ka's 40mpg.
Brilliant - cut my fuel consumption by 28% and saved £250 each year.
But....
1. Statistics show that I'm likely to lose about a fifth of that saving by driving more because it has become cheaper. This is the 'direct rebound effect'.
2. £250 is exactly the cost of a return flight from Newcastle to New York. Given my love of travel, this is a real option. If I take it, then I've just doubled the annual carbon emissions I had in the Ka. This is the 'indirect-' or 'respend-' rebound effect (or, as energy economists call it, the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate). If we save money through efficiency, we can easily wipe out the eco-benefits by choosing to buy or do something even more environmentally damaging with the windfall.
So what effect does this have in practice? The Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate is hotly debated in academic circles - certainly the prominent energy guru Amory Lovins once told me rather tersely that there was no empirical evidence for its existence.
In my opinion this is down to changing consumption patterns. Some time ago I immersed myself in consumer data and found that the fastest growing areas of expenditure were on telecommunications and home entertainment which are less carbon intensive (per pound/euro/dollar) than, say, road or air travel. A back of the fag packet calculation suggested that the rebound effect would not result in environmental damage getting worse, but that only about 50% of expected efficiency benefits would be delivered in practice.
The title of Lovins' own famous book, "Factor 4: doubling wealth, halving resource use", backs this up - a factor 4 improvement in resource efficiency will only result in a factor 2 reduction in resource use - the rest we enjoy in increased quality of life. I haven't seen him since to run this by him!
The bottom line is: with resource efficiency you never quite get the environmental benefits you expect, but it's still worth doing.
I have always been sceptical of the argument that multi-function devices like smart phones are eco-friendly by avoiding the need for a stack of equivalent individual devices (in this case MP3 players, digital cameras, wrist watches etc). I have an iPhone which did stop me purchasing a voice recorder for the interviews for The Green Executive (there was an app for that), but I already had an iPod, a digital compact camera, a watch etc, etc so the phone hasn't offset the purchases of those devices (although I am less likely to upgrade them in future).
I was watching BBC's Daily Politics on Monday to catch the latest on the RBS bonus affair that I had just blogged on, and, lo, there was an item on responsible capitalism. They focussed on B&Q, an excellent example of responsible business, but fell into the old trap of thinking the scope of corporate social responsibility begins and ends with supporting the local community. But then, in the interests of balance, up popped a chap from the Adam Smith Institute to declare that CSR was "a tax on the consumer."
is the most intellectually rigorous treatment of sustainability that I have ever come across.
