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BusinessGreen.com goes all Web TV
The phrase eating your own dog food always conjures up some pretty unpleasant images, but that is exactly what BusinessGreen.com will be doing tomorrow afternoon at 3pm GMT with the live broadcast of its inaugural web seminar.
Regular readers will know that we have written plenty of articles advocating the adoption of web and video conferencing systems, and now we are getting down and dirty with the technology ourselves through a live interactive web broadcast entitled Is your IT department ready for the green red tape?
Broadcast in association with IBM, the seminar will feature three exclusive presentations on how upcoming environmental legislation will impact your business, and more specifically your IT department, as well as interactive audience polls and the opportunity to put your questions to our panel of experts.
We've got a great line up of expert speakers in place with Kate Levick from the Carbon Disclosure Project providing an update the new green legislation that will affect UK firms in the coming years; IT analyst Andy Lawrence of the 451 Group explaining how carbon reporting software and more energy efficient systems will be essential to complying with such legislation; and Mick Walker, a green computing consultant with IBM's Systems and Technology Group, outlining some of the existing technologies that can aid green compliance efforts.
Anyone interested in taking part can do so from the comfort of their own desks simply by registering for the broadcast here.
And unlike a face-to-face event if you are busy tomorrow you can always sign up anyway and watch the recorded seminar at a later.
I look forward to (kind of) meeting with you tomorrow and hope you enjoy the show.
The Week in Green: Time to get insulated
Yesterday, I had my now annual flirtation with nihilism after sitting through a truly terrifying presentation on the latest climate change science.
Back in 2006 it was Al Gore giving me nightmares with an Inconvenient Truth, last year I caught Robert Watson, former chief scientist at the World Bank and now a scientific advisor at Defra, delivering a keynote address that made Gore's slide show seem gloriously optimistic, and yesterday it was the turn of Professor Chris Rapley, director of the Science Museum and former head of the British Antarctic Survey, to give a speech that made me want to rush home, draw the curtains and curl up under the duvet clutching a bottle of scotch.
Like many scientists, Rapley is not one for the fire and brimstone. Instead, he delivered his facts in a measured manner, which allowed the gravity of what he was saying to hit home all the harder.
In a nutshell, Rapley spent 40 minutes explaining why the threat from climate change is much, much worse than climate scientists first thought and why action to address the problem is taking place far too slowly.
He may have finished on an upbeat note, quoting JFK's famous assertion that, "Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man", but it was hard to share this optimism when it followed a graph showing that both temperatures and carbon emissions are rising faster than climate models predicted.
In short, the worst case scenarios keep getting worse - and they weren't great to start with.
Of course, succumbing to this gloomy outlook won't help anyone and thankfully there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic that the transition to a low carbon economy can be delivered: it makes economic sense, legislators are committed to making it happen, big business is on board, and exciting new technologies from wave generators to smart grids are emerging all the time.
But that does not mean that terrifying reminders about the sheer scale of the climate crisis are no longer necessary.
It is only by hammering home the magnitude of the climate change threat that politicians and business leaders will be compelled to act, particularly when so many of them are still yet to engage with the very simplest measures that are required to curb emissions.
In many ways, it is this widespread failure to undertake the simple energy and cost saving initiatives that make economic as well as environmental sense that is even more depressing than the predictions for the climate.
Rapley was speaking at a conference on clean tech investment hosted by research firm Library House, where delegates repeatedly bemoaned the fact that while investment is flowing rapidly towards big exciting energy projects in the fields of solar and wind, more mundane but no less environmentally significant innovations in the areas of energy efficiency and material design are being neglected.
I hate the use of the word sexy in this context - partly because it has become a cliché, but mostly because it seems like an insult to sex - but as many of the investors observed certain clean technologies and practices have become regarded as glamorous and attractive, while many of the apparently uglier measures that could actually make big differences here and now are being shunned.
Thankfully, this appears to be changing with more and more investors expressing an interest in areas such as energy efficiency, but more action is urgently required.
Making insulation sexy is never going to be easy, but as Rapley points out the scale of the crisis is now so huge that businesses can no longer afford to be picky about which carbon cutting measures they choose to embrace.
They need them all and if they aren't willing to start with the energy efficiency measures that are the simplest to undertake then we might as well all start hiding under the duvets.
Right, I'm off to try and work out how an SUV makes environmental sense.
Have a good weekend,
James
The Week in Green: They say the darkest hour comes just before the dawn
I think it was the Canadian novelist and chronicler of the modern condition Douglas Coupland who once explained how he started each day by perusing the papers in the newsagent, in the knowledge that as long as no more than three front pages were covering the same story it had been a pretty good day.
By that reckoning it has been a bloody awful week. There has only been one story in town as everyone tries to get their head round the financial crisis gripping the world's markets. From Meltdown Monday to Woeful Wednesday, the headline writers at least have been enjoying themselves.
In five short days, we have all become more familiar than any of us ever wanted to be with concepts such as derivatives, short selling and moral hazard; while the economics reporters and journalists who are usually confined to a few pages near the sports section have emerged blinking into the light, clearly taking a bit too much pleasure in their new found profile.
One of the more interesting aspects of the whole sorry mess is the sight of everyone desperately casting round for a consensus. In the past 24 hours alone you could find respected commentators who would support any one of these positions, sometimes all at once: It's the speculators fault, it's the lenders fault, it's the regulators fault; the worst of the blood letting has finished, it has only just begun; this is a crisis of capitalism, it illustrates the health of capitalism; the "real economy" will ride out the storm, the "real economy" is in for a full blown depression.
The fact, as one city source told me, is that "no one knows what will happen next".
Thus far today, optimism founded on reports that the US government may step in to buy up bad debt has led to a sizable recovery, but the fear remains that one more unpleasant rumour about a major bank's balance sheet could send the whole edifice tumbling down again.
It is in the face of all this uncertainty that the consistent position adopted by the green business sector is all the more surprising.
There appears to be genuine agreement across clean tech firms, businesses aspiring for sustainability and the carbon markets about how the meltdown will impact them, and what's more they don't seem that worried.
Obviously, it is important not to overstate this upbeat message. Firstly, it appears crass when everyone is now convinced that considerable economic pain is on the way, and secondly no one is pretending that the financial crisis will make anything easier - quite the opposite in fact.
In the short term, large scale renewables and clean tech projects know that accessing credit will be extremely tough, while risky start ups could also suffer as a result of weak investor confidence.
Equally, firms on the edge of bankruptcy will never be able to justify the significant up front capital costs that go with a shift towards a low carbon business model. Such investments may lower operating costs in the long run, but when you are not sure that a long run exists, the case for hoarding what cash you have becomes ever stronger.
And yet optimism remains.
Clean tech investment levels may fall back a little in the wake of the current crisis, but the long term trend for these companies remains good. Two separate reports this week showed record investment levels for clean tech firms in recent months and while no one expects that to continue over the next few months as the tremors from this week take effect there is complete confidence they will bounce back again in the medium term, particularly as clean tech firms begin to scale up and deliver solid returns.
The carbon market, meanwhile, is even expecting to prosper from some of the current problems. Some banks may well pull away from the market as they restructure their trading operations, but others will see in carbon a simpler commodity than the derivatives that got Lehman Brothers and others into so much trouble.
It was also informative to see analysts Point Carbon upgrading its price expectations for carbon credits this week even in spite of a likely drop off in demand.
However, the most interesting potential repercussion of this week's market crisis (or correction, depending on your point of view) is for the environmental performance of the wider economy.
I know I wrote about this earlier in the week, but it is truly remarkable how quickly business leaders and commentators have realised the opportunity the problems in the City and Wall Street now present for the low carbon economy.
As Paul Dickinson of the Carbon Disclosure Project explains, the cause of the current crisis can be found in a failure to properly assess risk and an absence of adequate oversight and regulation. These are the exact same causes of the climate crisis and an increased focus on these concepts can only draw attention to the need for more concerted action on carbon emissions.
Today's letter to the prime minister from the Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change, underlines the extent to which this realisation has dawned on many business leaders, with them calling explicitly for more environmental regulation and a massive expansion in public sector spending on green projects as part of a coordinated effort to stimulate a flagging economy.
Some of the signatories may not yet live up fully to their own rhetoric on climate change, and it will be interesting to see if they would also support the higher taxes that would be required to pay for increased public sector spending, but the distance between these progressive business leaders and the old school anti-regulation corporate titans is now startling.
Were the government to seize the opportunity presented by this level of corporate backing and tie in a serious package of environmental measures to the raft of financial regulations that are now promised, then just maybe the financial crisis of 2008 will be remembered not as the end of capitalism, but year zero for the low carbon economy.
Right, I'm off to burn me some eucalyptus.
Have a good weekend,
Cheers,
James
Hang overs, smoke stacks and the case for decentralised power
I spent much of the weekend being ferried around Yorkshire (friend's stag do since you ask; the St Leger at Doncaster, followed by several evenings of, well, enough of that).
One of the most noticeable features of the landscape is that you are never too far from a dirty great big smoke stack.
A quick Google Maps search tells you there are at least four power stations near Leeds and I think I saw three of them, although in fairness, as with all good stag dos, things were a bit hazy at this point and I might have been looking at the same one twice.
There were two things that were immediately striking about these power plants.
Firstly, how anyone has the nerve to complain about the visual intrusiveness of wind turbines when the alternative is these monstrosities is as intractable mystery as any Lehman Brothers' derivatives contract. They dominate the landscape for miles around like later-day cathedrals, so much so that you can nod off and wake up a few minutes later and still see the blasted thing. To call them ugly would be an insult to ugliness - they are the visual equivalent of putting your money on a horse that doesn't even get out of the gate.
And secondly why are there so many of them concentrated in such a small area?
The answer is partly to do with the historical proximity of a ready supply of coal from Yorkshire's mines and the continued proximity of northern cities such as Leeds and Manchester.
However, it is also a sad fact of the UK's energy grid that the shift in the population balance towards the south east over the last few decades means that our energy infrastructure no longer fits with our usage profile. The UK's energy profile has become an anachronism where one of the biggest challenges is shifting the power generated by the cluster of Northern power stations and the hydroelectric facilities of Wales and Scotland to the cities and towns that need it further south.
It is in this light that the government's continuing reluctance to support onsite micro generation technologies looks all the stranger.
You would have thought that faced with having to deliver the biggest overhaul of the UK's energy infrastructure since it was first built there would have been at least the temptation to try and tackle the transmission challenges presented by centralised power generation.
Instead, the government has only made the challenge still more daunting through its support for both a massive expansion of wind farms, which by definition are located far from population centres, and new nuclear power plants, which by definition are located far from population centres. Consequently, alongside overhauling our energy generation we will also have to overhaul the entire grid to cope with supply sources that are even more spread out and varied than they are now.
That is not to say this strategy is entirely wrong, indeed both wind and nuclear are urgently required as part of a low carbon energy mix.
It is just that it is strange that a more decentralised approach to energy generation was apparently given such short shrift when it would have delivered multiple benefits: simultaneously allowing us to build fewer expensive new turbines and nuclear reactors, reduce grid transmission headaches, and give communities a much clearer sense of where their energy comes from - a phenomenon that would encourage them to appreciate the energy they use and save it where possible.
The government has on occasions revealed that it does understand all this, talking up the potential of micro generation, while also showing an increasing willingness to give the go ahead for community scale biomass plants. But it has never displayed the enthusiasm for these technologies evident in countries such as Germany where the feed in tariff has already delivered the first green shoots of a decentralised energy network.
Perhaps if Ministers ever found themselves staring long and hard at an ugly, big power station, while consigned to the back of a stuffy minibus with an ugly, big hangover they might think again.
The Week in Green: Gordon Brown and some unfinished sympathy
I've been feeling a bit sorry for Gordon Brown.
I know that as admissions go this is pretty much on a par with confessing to a penchant for the hits of James Blunt and a sneaking admiration for the "comedy" of Jim Davidson, but I'm afraid I can't help it.
It was the kicking the prime minister has taken in the past 24 hours over the decision not to slap a windfall tax on energy firms and increase fuel assistance payments that finally brought on this wave of sympathy.
It is possible, indeed logical, to disagree with many things Brown says and does, but it is surely impossible to disagree with his assertion that faced with a period of rising energy prices that is likely to continue for at least the next decade we should eschew "short-term gimmicks or giveaways" in favour of long term energy efficiency programme that can bring down bills permanently.
The campaign for a windfall tax and increased winter fuel payments was always a crass populist measure drummed up by Labour backbenchers increasingly fearful over their political future.
There are undoubtedly serious problems approaching this winter that will leave many poorer households struggling to pay their energy bills, but if you take a dispassionate look at what was being proposed as a solution you realise that it is quite simply insane.
There is arguably a relatively strong case for a windfall tax on the energy companies to recoup the multibillion pound windfall they enjoyed from the botched first round of the European emissions trading scheme (although I'd suggest that increasing the number of carbon credits they have to buy at auction would prove a more effective means of raising this money). But any revenue raised through such a raid on corporate profits should be used to accelerate the development of renewables and adoption of energy efficiency measures such as insulation, not fund hand outs.
If this revenue were simply to be used to increase fuel payments to households we would end up in a bizarrely circuitous scenario whereby the energy companies were being taxed to hand money to people who would then use it to pay their bills from the energy companies. Am I the only one who thinks this is a little daft?
This is not, of course, to belittle the very real suffering that is likely to be meted out to many households this winter, nor the huge number of small businesses that are going to struggle to cope with soaring energy bills. So what can be done to tackle the problem?
Forcing the energy companies to fix their prices may have an attractive simplicity to it, but it is quite rightly in breach of UK competition law and should not be countenanced.
Instead, we should, as Brown advises, recognise that with global energy supplies constrained and the energy companies obligated to fund the shift towards renewables above inflation increases in fuel bills are with us for the long term. Offer people handouts to help them pay their bills and you will have to do the same again next year, and the year after that, and the year after that...
The only answer is to bring down the amount of energy we use, something Brown appears to have recognised and is apparently keen to act on.
Whether my sympathy for our beleaguered prime minister lasts depends entirely on how he plans to achieve this.
The energy companies' existing insulation programmes simply aren't working fast enough and are in desperate need of an overhaul.
It is hard to disagree with the Local Government Association's view that it would be far more efficient to have the energy firms pay a greater chunk of their profits into a central fund and let the councils use the money to develop their own insulation programmes. As such councils would be able to insulate whole streets at a time, drastically improving the efficiency of a process that at the moment might see your neighbour get someone from British Gas to come round to fit free insulation, while you have to wait for someone from EDF to do the exact same job.
Equally, the government needs to realise that energy efficiency goes far beyond insulation and introduce similar schemes for subsidising or lowering the costs of double glazing and energy efficient appliances. The proposal for cutting VAT on green products, which appears to have drifted off the radar since it was first mooted last year, needs urgently reviving.
The CBI's proposals for green loans, which BusinessGreen.com revealed this week, should also be enthusiastically embraced. As CBI boss Richard Lambert explained the problem with energy efficiency investments for both householders and business leaders is the time lag between initial investment and financial rewards, and addressing these types of time lags is basically what the banking sector is for.
Return on investment periods for energy efficient products may be getting shorter all the time, but there is still a strong case for low interest loans, perhaps similar to the student loan scheme, that allow people to pay for energy efficient technologies and then only pay back the loan as cost savings are realised.
Better means of tracking energy savings would be required to convince people that their loan repayments are coming out of money they would not otherwise have had, but then again perhaps that would give the government the push it needs to finally mandate smart meters.
All of this should, of course, be repeated for the business sector. The current mess of green tax breaks and grants needs tidying up and made more accessible and generous, while the banks should also be encouraged to develop new financing mechanisms for green buildings and investments.
It might not have as instant an impact as increased handouts to bill payers, but were Brown to embrace all of these measures in next week's energy package then not only will he go a long way towards tackling fuel poverty but he would also deliver huge cut in carbon emissions.
If he does all that and still gets slated, then I really will feel sorry for him.
Right, I'm off to try and work out exactly who is responsible for enforcing the UK's eWaste laws.
Have a good weekend,
James
ExxonMobil, Nick Leeson, and the dilemma of relative terms
The problem with the word "cleanest" is that its definition entirely relative.
If you were to look at the criminal records of Reggie Kray, Ronnie Biggs and Nick Leeson I'd suggest that Leeson's is the cleanest - but I still wouldn't want him to manage my pension.
So for ExxonMobil to claim in its now banned TV ad that liquified natural gas is "one of the world's cleanest fuels" was always going to be a major risk.
Regardless of the fact that vetting body Clearcast approved the ad and the fact that anyone with even a passing knowledge of energy and carbon emissions would assume that Exxon meant that the fuel was being compared to other fossil fuels, the term should still have sent alarm bells ringing in the oil giants' marketing department.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has made it patently clear that any green claim that can be misinterpreted in any way will be treated harshly and the vagueness inherent in the phrase "one of the world's cleanest" was always going to attract their attention. As soon as the ASA decided that the viewer could easily believe that LNG was being compared with the solar, wind and nuclear energy sources mentioned in the advert it was bound to rule the advert misleading and slap a ban on it.
It appears that ExxonMobil has made an innocent mistake and it is easy to feel sorry for the company, which as an environmentalist is not an emotion that comes naturally. In this light, it is also understandable that it is considering an appeal; but that does not it make it right to do so.
The ASA does not lose many appeals and there is simply no way for the company to construct a watertight case in defence of the advert's claims. The term cleanest is relative and it is not clear from the advert what it is relative to - that's Exxon's mistake and it needs to suck it up.
The lesson for other firms is that when making green claims any term that it is equivocal in any way has to be avoided. Words like sustainable and environmentally frinedly have already been flagged as potentially misleading by the ASA, but a company's due diligence has to go much further than that.
Clarity is everything and if Exxon had simply said that LNG is one of the world's cleanest fossil fuels or had even included some verifiable data on its carbon footprint then its advert would stil be being broadcast.
Adverts have to be accessible for their intended audience, but they also have to be as precise and carefully worded as any legal contract. Those firms who forget this will see the publicity benefits that should be associated with green initiatives evaporate faster than Nick Leeson's millions.
