What Assures Consumers On Climate Change?

Sarah Rich
June 24, 2007 1:47 PM

The mantra of businesses targeting and converting consumers towards sustainable purchasing patterns has long been "small steps make all the difference." At Worldchanging, we are generally of the mind that in fact small steps ultimately make no difference in the face of catastrophic environmental collapse and limited time to make real change. But it's never an easy argument, since everyone has to start somewhere, and our consumption choices matter a great deal in aggregate.

Last week, two UK-based organizations, AccountAbility and Consumers International, released an extensive consumer survey exploring the big problem/small action conundrum, among many other things. They surveyed 2,734 people in the UK and the US to get a better understanding of consumers' sentiments about how and what they buy, and most importantly to find out who they trust (and how much) for information about their decisions. The 64-page report (available as a downloadable PDF) contains some predictable findings, such as the fact that "climate change is a mainstream consumer issue," but it also delves deeper, investigating the problems inherent in current consumer trends towards "climate consciousness" and presenting solutions that might push us past a touchy transitional period between understanding the problem and learning to take effective action.

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Ecological Footprint 2.0

WorldChanging Team
June 17, 2007 9:08 AM

by Worldchanging Intern, Alex Lowe:

To understand the subtleties and difficulties in ecological footprinting, think of accounting. In the past few years, Enron's collapse and the scandals that surrounded WorldCom gave people a small glimpse into the intricacies of accountancy. To the uninitiated, the swirl of news reports circa 2003 must have posed several questions: How hard can accounting really be? How can any grey areas exist in an activity as seemingly concrete and dry as counting beans?

But grey areas abound, and the task of accounting for nature's resources as well as their depletion from human demand is, to use the colloquial, a doozy. How can one compare the value of a single fish to that of a bushel of corn or a California redwood? How does that relationship change from the exhaust pouring out of your car or the dishwater circling your drain?

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Climate Counts - its a start...

At last, the climate revolution is getting -- well, consumer-friendly.

Today marks the launch of Climate Counts, a new nonprofit initiative to rate major consumer brands on their climate commitments and performance.

The project represents the first time big companies have been rated consistently on climate using a comprehensive, consistent, and credible set of metrics.

This is a fantastic start, but i feel it is only a start as there are so many other factors that need to included, such as social change. Here is looking forward to these leaders incorporating the philosophy of 'how you do anything, is how you do everything'.

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Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.

clipped from www.bestlifeonline.com Our oceans are turning into plastic...are we? By Susan Casey, Photographs by Gregg Segal A vast swath of the Pacific, twice the size of Texas, is full of a plastic stew that is entering the food chain. Scientists say these toxins are causing obesity, infertility...and worse. Fate can take strange forms, and so perhaps it does not seem unusual that Captain Charles Moore found his life’s purpose in a nightmare. Unfortunately, he was awake at the time, and 800 miles north of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean. Returning to Southern California from Hawaii after a sailing race, Moore had altered Alguita’s course, veering slightly north. He had the time and the curiosity to try a new route, one that would lead the vessel through the eastern corner of a 10-million-square-mile oval known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre

Food with 0.9% GM still organic, say farm ministers

clipped from environment.guardian.co.uk Organic foods can be labelled "GM-free" even if they contain up to 0.9% genetically modified content, European agriculture ministers decided yesterday. The decision provoked outcry among environmental campaigners and supporters of organic farming, who said it would lead to "genetic contamination". The ministers' meeting in Luxembourg supported commission arguments that setting a lower limit of 0.1% , the lowest level at which GM organisms could be scientifically detected, would place standards which would make organic produce too expensive for farmers.

GM Food Debates Heats Up with Global Warming

clipped from www.treehugger.com If you think the pro-genetically-modified-foods camp is pushy now, just wait till global warming starts razing the planet's surface, creating even harsher environments for food crops. "Trying to grow plants in Australian conditions, as in many countries around the world where the conditions are harsh, is challenging, and it is likely to get harder under the effects of climate change," said Mark Tester, a plant-genomics researcher at the University of Adelaide in Australia and an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow. Tester, who is decidedly on the side of GM foods, is working to identify genes responsible for making some plants more tolerable to hostile environments, including those afflicted by drought, salinity, and frost. The next step: moving these genes into plants for commercial production through conventional breeding and genetic-modification techniques.

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clipped from www.worldchanging.com t]he scramble for water is driven by the realities of population growth, political pressure and the hard truth that the Colorado River, a 1,400-mile-long silver thread of snowmelt and a lifeline for more than 20 million people in seven states, is providing much less water than it had. According to some long-term projections, the mountain snows that feed the Colorado River will melt faster and evaporate in greater amounts with rising global temperatures, providing stress to the waterway even without drought. This year, the spring runoff is expected to be about half its long-term average. In only one year of the last seven, 2005, has the runoff been above average. Everywhere in the West, along the Colorado and other rivers, as officials search for water to fill current and future needs, tempers are flaring among competing water users, old rivalries are hardening and some states are waging legal fight catalogu

Seeing the Future from High Above Greenland

Alex Steffen
May 23, 2007 3:37 PM

Unfortunately, if you're a member of the reality-based community, that other 60% of our climate impact is very much to the point.

So, too, are the indirect impacts of our lives, what's been termed our "public ecological footprint": the environmental and social impacts of all those things we almost never make direct personal decisions about, but which make possible our current ways of life, from the military, to the highway system, to the health care system. All of those deeply flawed systems are part of the backstories of our lives (though rarely counted in footprint calculations), and all need serious reengineering. Enormous damage is being caused by our attempts to prop up bad systems with minor incremental changes instead of working wholesale towards their improvement.

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Food Miles and Carbon Labels

As i sit in my tree house and smell the light scent of compost from my lasagna garden i think about how dependent we have become on our food suply being shipped from around the world to the grocery store and then to us. In the UK there has been a lot of talk lately on understanding food miles and more importantly having consumers understand them by way of carbon labels.

In North America we need to ask these questions and we need to look at solutions whether it be 100 mile diets, local 'green' houses (which can be green and emit less carbon than food shipped from across the globe), growing our own or a combination of them all. The Soil Association, the biggest organic body in Britain, may slap a ban on air-freighting. It is asking suppliers, the public and other interested parties for their views on flying in food to the UK. There are five options: 1. No change; 2. Labelling air miles; 3. Offsetting carbon from flights; 4. A selective ban; 5. A total ban. Read More...

Two things I know are true 1) the world is changing and 2) we need to rethink how we do things. So, would we change our purchasing choices if we know that the white asparagus we buy is air shipped to us from New Zealand and travels 14,000 kms ? Or would we still indulge? Is carbon labeling a good idea at all? Would consumers understand the significance of a bag potato chips having a little label saying that they have taken 78 grams of carbon to produce?

And when calculating the embedded carbon where do we start? from inception of the product? this is a complicated process, because the label has to reflect all the CO2 emitted while growing the potatoes and vegetable oil (pesticides, fertilizers, tractor fuel, etc.) as well as manufacturing, packaging, and transporting the chips. This would be a huge undertaking with many factors and standards that would need to be defined. Is this what a conscious brand truly would look like?

Simply, as a rule of thumb, I think we can all eat lower on the food chain (more plant based foods, less meat), eat less processed foods (more grains, less pasta), look at products with less packaging (bulk purchases) and most simply look to local organic production for your food choices.

Together we create change,
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