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May 2008 Archives

May 1, 2008 - Greenpeace

It’s difficult to imagine my world without Greenpeace in it. They have been such a force for good over so many years on so many critical issues.

But sometimes one does wonder what makes them tick – especially when they make strategic decisions about the best corporate targets through which to pursue their campaigns. Back in 1991, I was doing some work with Sainsbury’s on the accelerated phasing-out of CFCs. There was widespread agreement that Sainsbury’s was well ahead of the rest of the pack. One weekend, Greenpeace campaigners turned up and super-glued the doors of a lot of Sainsbury’s stores as part of its CFC campaign – using the simple argument that administering a good kicking to the acknowledged leader would send a very strong signal to all the laggards.

They got excellent press coverage. But what they never saw was the serious setback to Sainsbury’s work on CFC phase-out: far from encouraging the key individuals involved to do more, the reaction was “Sod it, why bother?”

Fast forward 17 years. Last week, Greenpeace campaigners dressed up as orang-utans to occupy three Unilever premises as part of their campaign against the continuing destruction of the rainforest as a consequence of palm oil production.

I have to declare an interest here as an adviser to Unilever (on palm oil, amongst other things!) So I’m biased, by definition. But I must say that Unilever is an odd company for Greenpeace to be picking on. It is, of course, a major user of palm oil. But it was instrumental in setting up the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil (the principal international body trying to do something about this critical issue), and currently chairs it. It is working closely with NGOs like WWF and independent academics to make faster progress where possible. And most importantly of all, it has been spearheading corporate efforts to alert policy-makers to the insanity of mandating and then subsidising new schemes to increase the production of first generation biofuels. Including biofuels from palm oil.

In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if Unilever didn’t get on top of this particular biofuels challenge before Greenpeace. It wasn’t so long ago that Greenpeace was out there very actively campaigning for the wholesale substitution of biofuels for hydrocarbon fuels, in order to help reduce emissions of C02. It’s gung-ho enthusiasm in those days was entirely unscientific (as in Greenpeace had done no proper life-cycle analysis, and entailed Greenpeace chumming up with some strange players – including Bob Shapiro of Monsanto who once fronted the bill at a Greenpeace Business Conference in 1999 to talk about the benefits of biotechnology.

So if you put together an historical ‘public policy balance sheet’ on biofuels, over the last decade or so, it could even turn out to be the case that Greenpeace was indirectly responsible for the deaths of more orang-utans in the Indonesian rainforest than Unilever. Given that public policy tends to be influenced more by Greenpeace than by big companies.

That may of course be a little unfair. But if Greenpeace is out there today claiming credit for Unilever’s new commitments on palm oil (announced today, but which have been under consideration for months inside the company and under discussion with its external advisers), then I just have to point out that they deserve no such credit on this particular occasion.

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Posted by JP on May 1, 2008 4:59 PM | | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

May 8, 2008 - Food Security

Forum for the Future is running an event for some of our partners in the built environment almost exactly one year on from this time last year. I’ve just reviewed the stuff we shoved at them a year ago – on climate change, energy security, peak oil, spatial planning, inequality, prospects for economic growth, and so on – and it’s quite mind-boggling to see how much the world has changed in the last year! And because the focus is on the built environment, I didn’t even mention things like food security which has “suddenly” soared up the global agenda.

I put ‘suddenly’ in those ironic speech marks simply because one of the most shocking things to have emerged in all the panic calls uttered recently by the UN and others is the degree to which this current crisis has been predicted by experts time after time – as politicians disregarded global food agendas, and research budgets were cut and cut again in the times of plenty.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has now summoned world leaders to an emergency summit in June, and set up a new Taskforce to put forward ways of dealing with the crisis. The World Food Programme has said it needs to find an additional $750 million to cope with the combination of growing numbers of people in need and rapidly rising food prices.

So, food security is back on the political agenda. Climate change is omni-present. Peak Oil is rising. The credit crunch is the new player on the block. Resource wars are looming. Rainforest destruction just won’t go away. Species loss is as bad as ever, but no one cares – for now. Water shortages are chronic.

But much, much more worrying are the linkages between all these notionally “separate” phenomena. The synergies, feedback loops, interdependencies. At long last, people are starting to make the connections – and are even beginning to link all those separate symptoms back to their root cause: today’s literally insane notion of getting richer by trashing the planet and screwing the poor.

Don’t hold your breath, but pretty soon you might even hear one or two of them start talking about population. And then you’ll know revolution is on the way.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on May 8, 2008 11:15 AM | | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

May 13, 2008 - London Array

So, Shell International have decided to pull out of the London Array project, the largest offshore wind farm (at around 100MW) in the UK.

I’ve got a little file on my desk here of all the press releases that the London Array Consortium has put out over the last few years – not least to drum up support from people like me as it wrestled with a recalcitrant Local Authority and other issues in terms of securing planning permission for the facilities required for the London Array.

It’s a great scheme. It still is – with or without Shell, whose withdrawal strikes me as a terrible decision. It’s difficult to imagine how companies of this kind come to decisions of that sort.

So I was all the more grateful for a windy uplift the day after Shell announced this decision, when I went along to help celebrate the commissioning of the Westmill Wind Farm, just outside Swindon – 5 x 1.3MW turbines, which anyone now using the mainline services into or out of Paddington can observe out of the train window. If ever you need firm confirmation that wind turbines enhance certain landscapes, rather than destroy them, Westmill provides that in all its glory!

westmill_windfarm1.jpg But what makes Westmill even more special is the fact that it is a co-operative venture, with a large number of individuals (including myself) who bought into the project, and 50% of whom live within a 50 mile radius of the project.
This was a great day!

Unfortunately, there are only a handful of co-operative wind projects of this kind in the UK – in contrast, for instance, to Denmark. As far as I can discover, there are no more than 5 actually up and running, with a few more in the pipeline.

So why does that matter? Who cares whether it is small-scale, local co-operative ventures delivering the Megawatts, or vast great, overhead-heavy multi-nationals? In truth, I will settle for more and more MW of wind wherever it comes from, but I have to say that I would much rather that many more on-shore projects came from Westmill look-alikes, leaving the off-shore mega-projects to the big guys – even if Shell does seem to have lost its bottle.

And I can’t help but think that this would make a bigger difference in terms of overcoming the often utterly spurious objections of planning committees than any amount of wordy advisory notes from government.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on May 13, 2008 11:34 AM | | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

May 30, 2008 - Fuel Tax Protests

PetrolPump_200.jpgThis all feels very much like one of those periodic crunch moments for the sustainability agenda. Fuel-tax protests. Rebellious backbenchers. The kind of febrile atmosphere we last saw in 2000. The Tory press on the war path. NGOs winding themselves up: “Stay green, Gordon, don’t be yellow”.

In 2000, the price of fuel was heading sharply upwards – not as sharply as today, but very uncomfortably. A motley consortium of some of the worst affected citizens (road haulage firms, farmers etc) took to their trucks and their tractors and blockaded key oil facilities in protest against the fuel tax escalator – a Conservative innovation which Labour was quite happily rolling on with. Within a few weeks, the Treasury caved in and agreed to decommission the escalator.

On the face of it, a minor blip. But a strong case has been made since then that it was this one setback that put paid to Treasury’s enthusiasm for the sustainability agenda. Ministers blamed both NGOs for not having come to their aid and the media for having hyped the whole thing into a massive crisis. The image of ‘Mondeo Man’, feral and unforgiving, was on display, virtually, the length and breadth of the Treasury’s corridors of impotence.

Roll forward eight years. It’s all stacking up again, with campaigns both to defer the projected increase in fuel taxes for the second time, and to reverse decisions announced in the budget on increases and vehicle excise duty. Ministers are ‘listening’; U-turns are widely anticipated.

And would that be so awful? Focussing for now on fuel taxes, just stand back for a moment. The essence of using fiscal instruments to change corporate and consumer behaviour relies on three things: transparency (so that people know what’s coming down the track at them); fiscal neutrality (so as not to piss everyone off by using green taxes primarily to increase revenues); and fairness (so that the less well-off in society are not further disadvantaged).

On those three counts, given the dramatic increases in the price of petrol and diesel over the last couple of years, everyone has been taken by surprise by the price hikes, apart from ‘Peak Oil’ campaigners (who have been telling us this was about to happen for years).

Moreover, the less well-off are being disproportionately hammered, and the hikes in fuel taxes are far from fiscally neutral and never have been.

So, economically, socially, ethically, what are the implications of all that?

Your thoughts really welcome. As the Government’s official advisers on such matters, what do you think the SDC’s advice should be?

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Posted by JP on May 30, 2008 9:38 AM | | Comments (20) | TrackBacks (0)

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