carrot mob

longer video and more details here: link

we had the same idea at a nag brainstorming to get everyone in a group to switch to the first bank to pledge to phase out junk mail, raises some interesting issues around consumerism (when its related to buying lots of stuff in a fun event - like the january sales but for good cause) but as a general form of activism is prob set to spread as its fun, easy to organise and catchy

oh and 'carrotmob' is a really great name for it too

:J

The FT does Peak Oil

Their 'balanced' reporting of different views (ie the spread between 'its already happening' vs 2030) & their characterisation of the Transition Town movement (as a hippy fringe) apart... this is a very serious look at the real possibilitity outlined in our last green shoots event with Jeremy Leggett that the affordable oil will soon be past its peak. It's not the news that interests me here, it's who is publishing it & what that says - as their headline puts it "Running on empty? Fears over oil supply move into the mainstream" - link

The Fishburn-meister

Tom is at Method and also in his 'spare time' draws nifty, funny and very pointed cartoons on his blog

There's even one he just posted based on something I said in the Green Marketing Manifesto :J

There's more to life than CO2

Reported via psfk, originally from the BBC

Peter Bradnock of the British Poultry Council says: "Organic poultry meat has about 45% more global warming potential than indoor-reared poultry meat. If you're rearing outside, then the bird is using a little more of its feed to keep itself warm, or simply to keep itself cool in hot climates."

It's a bit of an odd statement - what is 'global warming potential'? I tracked down the 45% source to a DEFRA study commissioned from Manchester biz school from Feb 2007:
* Organic birds require 25 per cent more energy to rear and grow than conventional methods.
* The amount of CO2 generated per bird is 6.7kg for organic compared to 4.6kg for conventional battery or barn hens.
According to this report the main difference is because: "with organic chickens the longer growing time means it has a higher impact".

Anyway that is nothing to do with the central issues of animal welfare, use of antibiotics and feed additives such as arsenic.

Carbon here is a side issue. There are 850 million chicken raised in britain a year; an average of about 14 per person per year. So on average the difference is just under 30kg of carbon dioxide vs your 11 tonne annual footprint. If you want to cut this down then eat less meat. Dont condemn animals to this:



As reported in The Independent, 4/01/08: "A covertly filmed video of factory-farmed chickens struggling to walk and enduring distressing and unnatural conditions is set to ignite a growing campaign to improve the lives of Britain's 800 million "broiler" chickens. The animal welfare group Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) shot the film at a farm which supplies meat to the country's leading supermarkets to illustrate the grim life inside chicken "coops" designed for 25,000 to 50,000 birds. The grainy video footage shows what looks like a white carpet of thousands of birds shuffling round aimlessly in a dimly lit shed. Some are limping or lifeless. Outside are dustbins stuffed full of dead chicks. Although their final destination is unknown, the birds were bought by a company which supplies more than 80 per cent of McDonald's chicken nuggets, as well as Morrisons, Sainsbury and the Co-op."

Bradnock has been on the barricades defending British chicken from the avalanche of criticism following the popular TV programmes raising awareness of the appalling, squalid conditions in which many chicken are raised in in the UK. But it isnt working. From an RSPCA survey in March:
• 73% of consumers are now buying chicken with a better life
• Almost 3 out of 4 think supermarkets should only sell higher-welfare chicken (freedom food, free range or organic)
• 90% of consumers said they would buy higher-welfare chicken because they are more concerned about how they are farmed than their own health

This thing about carbon footprints in that context looks like an appalling piece of old fashioned spin.

climate counts 08 scores now out

required reading for anyone tracking companies' progress on their sustainability commitments, a robust independent assessment intended to help people vote with their wallet (I blogged about this when it launched a year ago here)

go check it out at climatecounts.org

oh, yes and interestingly, it's looking like many of the new economy brands are in the doghouse: apple, amazon, ebay
it's recommend that the climate conscious avoid doing business with these companies
there's an interesting story in mcdonalds (okay) and starbucks (good) vs burger king & others (bad)

At what point is 'business at usual' bust?

(Guardian 06.05) As the death toll in Burma from Cyclone Nargis rises towards 30,000, one resident of Rangoon describes the desperate search for food, water and shelter in the city since the storm struck on Saturday

(BBC 06.05) Recent price rises have forced many Bangladeshis to reduce the amount they eat each day. Many Bangladeshis say they now no longer eat lunch and most can no longer afford to eat meat, fish or eggs.

(FT 06.05) Crude oil prices could surge to $200 a barrel in the next two years, according to the Goldman Sachs analyst who three years ago correctly predicted a price “super-spike” above $100 a barrel. Last month, Chakib Khelil, president of Opec, also warned oil could reach $200 a barrel.

"Goodbye for Nau"

The much vaunted Portland based eco sportswear company is closing down.




Showing panache to the last, their website today carried the headline: GOODBYE FOR NAU

It's such a sign of the times story... in case they don't keep it online here, this for future reference is what they had to say:

"In the current highly risk averse capital market we simply could not raise the necessary funds to continue to move forwards. We believe this is not so much a reflection of the viability of our business, but the result of an unfortunate confluence of events. Just as we could not have predicted the sudden groundswell of environmental consciousness that blossomed at the time we launched our business, we did not foresee the current crisis in the capital markets. At this time investors are loathe to invest in anything; especially it appears, a company like Nau that has the audacity to challenge conventional paradigms of what a business should be like."

A story in the Portland Business Journal notes:

"All five Nau stores will shut down: Bridgeport Village in Portland, and stores in Bellevue, Wash., Chicago, Boulder, Colo., and Los Angeles. The latter store opened just last month. Ninety-five people will lose their jobs. Though the closure seems sudden, the Portland-based sustainable clothing company has been struggling for a year. Nau executives told the Business Journal last July that they were scaling back expansion plans and tweaking their clothing mix. Nau executives have never released revenue figures. Nau had built a unique retail business based on sustainable products and operations combined with a charitable giving program that dedicated 5 percent of each sale to charity. Company bylaws prohibited any Nau executive from earning more than 12 times what the lowest-paid U.S. worker earned. The clothing also had no logo."

Only June last year, this was being tipped as a brand to watch: eg this in Fast Company magazine. "Today, Nau is a business with three months of sales under its belt by way of the Web and four retail stores (in Boulder, Colorado; Portland; Chicago; and Bellevue, Washington), 92 people, $24 million raised in capital, and four clothing collections in various stages of production. The business plan projects $11 million in revenue this year, growing to $260 million and 150 stores by 2010." But it's the ideals that were more impressive: "We believed every single operational element in our business was an opportunity to turn traditional business notions inside out, integrating environmental, social, and economic factors. Nau represents a new form of activism: business activism."

I'd like to say brilliantly well done to Eric Reynolds, Chris Van Dyke and the team for trying something like this - if it's any consolation you have still created a shining example for others to follow, and many if not most attempts to do something groundbreaking do fail. It's such bad luck to have been caught out so early on. Also you never know what the future will bring, any one of the near hundred staff may now be about to try something even more world changing based upon the experience and the lessons and sheer sense of possibility gained from Nau. Still it must be bitterly disappointing & I am sure everyone reading this will be feeling for you. As the saying goes, "we grieve with you".

This may also prove to be something of a Bear Sterns style warning to the whole green consumerism (eco luxury) end of things. Wherever 'green is the new' black supported the model, or more starkly where the goods required people to pay more for green and/or the purchase was rather discretionary, then it will probably be a tough year. Especially as in this case if you need injections of capital or have any cash flow issues. But not to panic, for instance if you sell to a dark green niche, then they are hardly going back to buying crap versions of what you do. And with change, provided it isn't fatal, there are often opportunities to innovate too. Howies met a near fatal moment early on when they moved to organic cotton and most of their wholesaler/trade customers dropped them because it was "too pricey" - but this was the stimulus for them to launch their own catalogue, now the mainstay of the business.

And also perhaps even a valuable lesson; can we build tomorrow's social ventures relying on capitalist investors (rather than for instance community/co-operative/co-ownership models)? For all the stuff about justifying their rewards based on an appetite for risk, the evidence of the majority of major investors I have ever seen close up is that they are a force for conservatism when times are good (always pushing for the easiest buck) and pull the plug at the first sign of trouble. Whenever there is an investor the business is geared to maximise profit, rather than a mixed yield of community 'goods'.

Hedge Funds Target Farming (!!!)

(Image of Haiti following recent food riots)






From Yesterday's FT (25/04/08): Hedge funds and investment banks are swapping their Gucci for gumboots as they bet on rising food prices by buying farms. Billions of dollars are flowing into farmland across the world as investors gorge themselves on vast tracts of Australia, South America and eastern Europe. “Sell banks, buy cheese,” Crispin Odey, manager of London-based hedge fund Odey Asset Management who has started investing in farming companies, said recently. His recommendation is being followed by many hedge funds and a new type of farmland holding company – often backed by hedge funds – which believe the food boom will make farming highly profitable. Mr Odey, who has started investing in farming companies, told investors in a conference call this week: “What we wanted to do was get ourselves involved in making the recurring revenues that we felt that we could make from the price of wheat staying up.” Other hedge funds and investment banks are buying farms to give their commodity traders an edge from first-hand information about costs and prices. Ospraie Management, a New York commodity fund, for example, owns farms, while Morgan Stanley’s commodities business has several thousand acres of Ukraine. Most of the new breed of farm investors believe the world is entering an era of high food prices where farms will once again be profitable, after two decades of being starved of investment. “It is an unashamed bet on the continuing rise in the price of food stuffs and the rapid recovery of the farming industry,” said one hedge fund manager. This creates two opportunities: buy successful farms to profit from rising food prices and possible land price rises, or pick up cheap land in developing countries and bring it into production or improve it to raise yields. (...)Emergent Asset Management is even more ambitious, with the British hedge fund manager aiming to raise €1bn (£787m) over the next year to put into sub-Saharan African farmland. It has firm commitments of €100m for the first round, and investors have taken options to invest another €500m for the five-year closed-end fund, set up in partnership with local farming specialist Grainvest. “The cost of land is very, very low,” said Paul Christie, marketing director of Emergent. “We want to make the land more productive. It is industrial scale farming and it is going to make a big difference down there.”

JG comment. The likely result? Continuing high food prices (they are in this for maximum profit). Billions still starving. Destructive farming practices. The idea of hedge fund style speculation targeting the farming sector is both sadly inevitable (speculation in commodities must be partly responsible for the food price hike in the first place) and represents likely increases in throwing people off land, deforestation, soil erosion, mass use of chemical pesticides & so on. You have to vaguely wonder if a (Brent Spar scale) NGO response might be one of the only ways of diverting this? I really dont think we can afford to let the people who brought us the credit crunch loose on developing world food supplies?

Video for Charlie Leadbeater's New Book

Charlie was a good friend to St Luke's & is passionate and very knowledgeable about social progress, new ways of working and the liberating potential of technology (see also his pro am Demos report co-authored with Paul Miller of school of everything)

I got his video via authenticblogging - thanks Libby & congratulations on being a schoolofeverything featured teacher

Oh and Charlie also did a TED talk a few years ago

(it's saturday, there's a warm spring light & it feels like everything is somehow more connected than we often realise)

:J

TED talks on DVD

For those who don't have the patience or bandwidth to watch them online, Adrian at McFilter has bundled up a DVD you can download using bittorrent and burn to watch at home. It's all legit because they are published with a creative commons license.

The Ken Robinson talk contains one of my favourite Ted anecdotes:

Ken to 5 year old Girl: what are you painting?
Girl: I'm painting God
Ken: That's interesting - I dont think anyone knows what he looks like
Girl: Well they will in 5 minutes!

Here's the link

Permanence and Grace

Congratulations!

PERMANENT PUBLICATIONS (www.permaculture.co.uk) a UK publisher producing practical books, magazines and websites which enable people to reduce their carbon footprint and live more sustainable lifestyles, has just won a prestigious Queen's Award for Enterprise 2008, in the Sustainable Development category.

The new issue of their magazine just came out - you can subscribe online here. If you are trying to glimpse what the world could be like, beyond both the present mess and also the tyranny of the status quo I'd heartily recommend checking it out. Permaculture seems to be a uniquely generative point of view - not just in transforming the agriculture of whole countries like Cuba (back to a healthy, diverse, fertile & productive mode, working with nature rather than against it) - but also in providing the inspiration and intellectual underpinning for the Transition Towns movement & much besides. I met with Maddy (the editor/CEO) & Tony (ad manager) last week and I think there may be some very interesting lessons from permaculture for business too, particularly for entrepreneurial social ventures. It's something they are clearly interested in too with articles about the Totnes Pound, & the new community cooperatives. Watch this space. :J

MORE DETAILS (Why they won the Award):

The Queen's Award panel, endorsed by the Prime Minister's office, have honoured Permanent Publications because of its continuous achievement and unfettered commitment to progressing sustainability internationally. "All the staff at Permanent Publications are passionate about providing people with information and the means to live a greener, more creative future," says Permanent Publications' Chief Executive and co-founder Maddy Harland. "We are very pleased to receive this award as it is a clear indicator that the vital issues of climate change and peak oil are being taken seriously. We also welcome this opportunity to emphasise the strength of the grassroots permaculture network worldwide and its creative solutions to the problems facing our planet." Permanent Publications publishes practical books by critically acclaimed authors and the quarterly Permaculture Magazine Solutions for Sustainable Living, established in 1992 with a readership of 600 people. It is now read in 77 countries both in print and online, with over 100,000 readers. Permanent Publications' offices are based at a recycled naval base (formerly HMS Mercury) on the South Downs Way in Hampshire. The site is now The Sustainability Centre, an environmental educational charity which they helped found in 1995. The company is a low carbon operation and demonstrates a commitment to sustainable business at all levels. It does not have a rubbish collection but recycles, reuses or composts its waste. Its offices are heated by biomass sourced on site, water is heated by solar thermal panels and the toilets are flushed with rainwater. Company procurement policy is Fair Trade and ethical. Permanent Publications is active in supporting environmental projects in their local community, as well as nationally and globally. It has been at the cutting edge of sustainable solutions for almost two decades and winning the Queen's Award for Enterprise endorses the vital necessity of their work.

UK Government: Tackling the Energy Crisis

Speeds limits on motorways will remain 70mph, but on dual carriageways they will become 60mph, and on all other roads 50mph. The plan includes restrictions on heating levels and on the use of electricity for outdoor display and advertising. There will also be loans to industry for energy-saving investment and a doubling of the standards of thermal insulation for new homes.The strict controls on energy consumption will form the British way of life for the foreseeable future. Last November petrol ration coupons were introduced....

Well okay it was back in 1974, brilliant link from today's BBC story noting that:"The price of oil has hit a new record above $115 a barrel after a US government inventory report raised concerns about supplies."

Stern Takes Bleaker View on Warming

“We underestimated the risks . . . we underestimated the damage associated with temperature increases . . . and we underestimated the probabilities of temperature increases,” Lord Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, told the Financial Times on Wednesday.

The Stern report on climate change underestimated the risks of global warming, according to its author, Lord Stern, and should have presented a gloomier view of the future. In retrospect, he said, he would have taken a much stronger view in the report on the drastic changes that would come about if greenhouse gas emissions were not abated. In the report, he estimated the costs of climate change at between 5 per cent and 20 per cent of global gross domestic product. But these costs would be much higher if the report had taken a more aggressive stance on the probable consequences of warming. Lord Stern said data published since his report came out, in October 2006, had led him to change his mind.

(FT 16.04.08)

MARKETING & MORALITY (?)

I am talking at Under the Influence for the second year running tomorrow, hosted once again by the lovely Iris and Contagious magazine - here's what I am going to say (dunno if I will show all the charts, but seemed helpful to spell it out for broader circulation). Hopefully should lead to an interesting debate, there & here for that matter. It's a free event anyway, with nice beer & nice people - do pop down if you are free :J

My slideshow link: at Flickr

Al Gore/ACP Ad Campaign

(via Deutsche Press Agentur)

Al Gore has launched a $300-million advertising campaign aimed at raising awareness in the US about the dangers posed by global warming. Gore's organization, The Alliance for Climate Protection, said the ad blitz was the largest ever for a public policy issue and was aimed at increasing pressure on political leaders to act urgently to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gas pollutants. 'We can solve the climate crisis, but it will require a major shift in public opinion and engagement,' Gore said. 'The technologies exist, but our elected leaders don't yet have the political will to take the bold actions required. When politicians hear the American people calling loud and clear for change, they'll listen.'
The campaign which will include TV, print, radio and online advertising, aims at engaging 10 million new supporters to drive policy change. Currently the Alliance says it has one million active supporters. The campaign will be funded by private donations and the Alliance already has pledges for half the amount. Speaking on TV news magazine 60 Minutes, Gore also revealed that he would be contributing his Nobel peace award, plus his profits from his work as a venture capitalist and from the book and movie project 'An Inconvenient Truth' to the campaign. The first clip, which airs Wednesday, shows images from World War II with actor William Macy comparing the urgent need for climate action with the fight against Nazism. Another clip brings together black activist Al Sharpton with conservative preacher Pat Robertson saying they agree on almost nothing except the need to deal with global warming.

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