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April 29, 2008 - Good News Week

It’s a bit gloomy out there at the moment: climate change, food shortages, very high oil prices, the credit crunch, impending recession – little wonder that people are beginning to look as downcast as our Prime Minister must be feeling.

Against the odds, however, last week was stuffed to the gills with good news as far as I was concerned. To start with, I spoke at a conference organised by a little office supplies company in Cheltenham (called The Commercial Group), where more than 250 other small businesses were regaled with what is one of the most inspiring case studies of a company going from almost nowhere to being a serious player in just 2 years. They also heard from the redoubtable Eugenie Harvey, of “Save the World for a Fiver” fame, who I reckon could cheer up even Jim Lovelock in his gloomiest “Death of Gaia” moments.

Then I went to open a state-of-the-art new building near Stroud, where a group of companies collectively known as The Green Shop Group are being re-housed. “If you want to change the world, you must begin from where you are”, says Roger Budgeon, Founder of The Green Shop, and the modest, unassuming inspiration behind this amazing initiative. Check it out – and if you have ever despaired at getting alternative building and DIY products, I guarantee that you’ll find them there.

At the start of the week, the 2008 Queen’s Awards for Enterprise were announced and included in the Sustainable Development category are two of the outstanding exemplars of year-on-year corporate excellence on all things sustainable (namely, Wessex Water and BT), as well as (somewhat less predictably!) Permanent Publications, publisher of the wonderful Permaculture Magazine, which was launched in the UK in 1992 with a reach of just 600 people, and now has more than 100,000 readers all over the world.

artistsimpression.jpgAnd lastly, sitting on a train checking emails, I found myself bursting out with laughter at an email from my colleagues on the South West Regional Development Agency, informing us that no less a global figure than George Bush had explicitly name-checked a big wave project the RDA is investing in off the coast of Cornwall, called Wave Hub. My cup positively overflowed at the knowledge that even George is now out there routing for renewable energy schemes in places he’s probably never even heard of!

Picture: Artists impression of the Wave Hub by www.ind-art.co.uk

Posted by JP on April 29, 2008 2:27 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

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

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