Green Gossip
Waves PR: July 15, 2009
A few things have come together to inspire this blog: a superb series in the Sunday Times magazine; a rather funny article where Tony Blair is trying to pick up the Al Gore ‘Inconvenient Truth’ mantel, and a press release forwarded by a colleague, Nick, earlier today (the RICE Report).
It’s not so many years ago that they claimed that modelling the weather would take x amount of supercomputers and could probably not be done. How life has moved on. Reports have long since made direct links between global warming and finances if we fail to act, but science is best guess based on information available.
Carbon emissions are, from today, absolved of half of the blame (but only half, note!) for global warming. The RICE release on the Nature Geoscience study claims that only about half of the heating that occurred during a well-documented period of rapid global warming in Earth’s ancient past can be explained by current climate models. Unsuprisingly then, our current situation is even more complex than we imagine.
Doom-mongers claim that something cataclysmic will happen to do away with humanity anyway. Nihilists claim it’s all tosh full stop. The truth is probably, boringly, somewhere in the middle – that if we fail to address the problems being created and adapt to a new way of living, nature will, as usual, find a way to force that change upon us.
Which is all reflected the Sunday Times piece, Eat Me…And Save the Planet, in which Richard Girlin ‘unwraps the tangled economics of food waste, packaging and recycling’ - or attempts to. A challenge indeed, valiantly addressed.
In some respects, Girlin is a little harsh , pointing to carrier bag reuse as just a dent in our habits. And at just over 3% of what’s in our wheelie bins, he has a point. But 3% is not insignificant. The habit change was backed because for businesses it made commercial sense, and consumers are rewarded for a change of habit both financially and in feelgood factor – and it was backed by government. In his own words, ‘cheap and easy’.
But the points he makes are well considered. Packaging legislation sometimes achieves the opposite of what it intends. There should be greater emphasis on reuse than on recycling. Councils, government, companies, government need to play their part.
And so do individuals. The article has a telling quote from Arnold Black:
“fourteen industrial plastics are used in different combinations, for no better reason than that the public has got used to the look and feel of things.”
Habit is a hard thing to break – ask any smoker, dieter, or given-up-chocolate-for-Lent-er. Consumers, faced with same item, same quality, same price, equally accessible, will pick the green or ethical version each time. If ’doing the right thing’ affects this balance, the decision is harder.
When the Sony Greenheart phones were announced, I lauded them – but despite being due for a change of phone, didn’t rush to buy one. I like the ease of communication of a Blackberry. So I’d like Blackberry to make it easy (and since many of those in the coridoors of power possess Blackberrys (or should that be Blackberries?) perhaps they wield a subtle influence.)
I’d like the chickens I eat to have had a nice life AND be cheap enough to maintain a family budget . I’d like the packaging on my food to be fully recyclable. I have little control over either of these factors without government intervention. (I did suggest keeping chickens in the garden, but was voted out on the grounds that football space is more important.)
So I’m not sure that the personal waste manifesto suggested in nthe article is going to have a lot of impact at face value. We all aim to buy only the food we need , but unless we make repeated (and not very green) smaller trips to supermarkets this is hard to judge. (Note to Sainsburys: supermarkets could help by making their pickers aware that delivering a week’s shop with everything with sell by date of the next day creates problems.) Learning more is easy, but making it actionable and easy is hard. Ironically the easiest action suggested is to pressure local authorities on their waste/recycling schemes. My letter is being drafted right now.
So I’m very suprised that the Sunday Times wasn’t tempted to follow their article – which is a thorough debate of some of the issues – with their interview with Tony Blair: ‘I’m a Planet-Saving Kind of Guy’.
“The answer to climate change,” he says solemnly, “is the development of science and technology. Yes, we will get changes in the way we consume but we will be consuming differently, not necessarily less. People are not going to return to the 19th century. The critical thing is to use the technologies we have and to incentivise the development of new ones. That is the only practical way we will make this thing work.”
Whilst I agree that things will need to be step changes for consumer acceptance, I don’t think the answer is purely the technology. There are things that Mr Blair, with a wealth of resources at his disposal, could and should be doing on a personal level. Awareness, actions, choice and practical legislation have to work together.
But if for example, Britain took the wealth of skill in car building that we have in pockets in this country, and rather than shoring up a failing industry invested in green technology innovation in the car industry, we lose no more money than at present, but offer both vision and a future.
Like the RICE story, we need to think outside of the box to find the answers, and challenge conventional wisdom. Marketers need to play their part. Kudos now comes with using granny-shopping bags. Models are leading the charge for vintage clothes (second hand chic). It can happen.
Now, more than ever, this is a bottom-up revolution, and each of us can play our part.
Useful links:
Sunday Times: Eat Me….and Save the Planet
Tags: environment
environment | claireatwaves | 
July 15, 2009 5:06 pm
Subscribe