I'm on the train back North having attended the Skillfair Consultants Conference in London - I go every year to learn from other boutique and solo consultants with a wide range of skills and services. One of the great grumbles at these sessions is the perception of the 'big name consultancies' as low risk compared to smaller operators, when the smaller operator will be cheaper, and, more importantly, you will always get the principal consultant working on your project.

The old trick of buttering up a client with senior staff until signing the contract and then appointing naive beginners to deliver the project is known in the trade as 'bait and switch'. I recently heard a first hand account (from the frustrated client) of a case where the client wanted to compare the carbon footprints of their numerous but similar sites. The well known firm they employed dropped a different team of juniors into each site (thus maximising fees in a short timeframe) and, lo, each team measured the footprint of their designated site in a different way rendering the comparison useless. Would a one-man-band have done the same? Very unlikely - it would be very inefficient to invent multiple methods - and they wouldn't stay in business for long if they were so incompetent to do so.

The moral of the story is that big isn't always better. Choose carefully...

Labels: carbon emissions, environmental consultancy, environmental consultants, rant

Maybe it's just because it is summer, but I'm getting lots of crazy offers from telesales people recently.

Typically the spiel is along the lines of:

"We're running this fantastic event about sustainable [procurement/strategy etc]. We've been given your name as you are a leading [reads something verbatim off the front page of our website - dead giveaway]. Would you be interested?"

The killer punchline, if I let the call run its course, is they usually want me to pay to give a seminar to a room full of people who are desperate to open their fat wallets, but who haven't a clue where to get help.

I now stop them in their tracks. "If you want me to deliver a seminar it will cost you £X 000".

My seminars are of value to attendees, therefore I charge. That's what I do for a living - exchange value for money. These people are looking for speakers whose sessions have negative value, otherwise they wouldn't have to pay to deliver them. You get what you pay for...

Labels: rant, seminars

I was at an event the other week where a keynote speaker put up a picture of an ancient Landrover and said "This is my car. I'm eco-friendly as the emissions from vehicle production are much higher than those in use, so keeping it on the road is the right thing to do!"

"Rubbish" thought I (or words to that effect). But I gave him the benefit of the doubt and looked up some published stats, and as you can see the use phase comes to 80% and the manufacture 18%.

Toyota Gasoline Vehicle CO2 Emissions:

Driving 72%
Fuel production 8%
Vehicle production 6%
Material production 12%
Others 2%

But everybody knows this - who on earth told him the opposite?

Another one...

In May's ENDS Report, a Rosi Fieldson is quoted as saying "The more technologies that are put into a home, the higher the embodied carbon [ie that required to produce materials, components and build the house] becomes. Currently embodied energy is 15% of energy used over the building's life time .... In a zero carbon home this would rise to 80-90%."

Well either Dr Fieldson has been misquoted or she needs to go back to primary school to sort out her maths. It's a percentage! If you cut one part of the pie, the percentage taken by the other must go up because the two parts must add up to 100!

Strictly speaking the embodied energy of a zero carbon home should be 100% of lifetime energy, because the usage (non-renewable) energy is 0%. But it doesn't tell you whether the amount of embodied energy goes up or down...

I think I'm going to go and lie down in a darkened room...

Labels: energy, fun, life cycle assessment, rant