EU seeks to fight climate change with taxes

The Commission will on 28 March present ideas for “green taxes” to save energy and cut greenhouse gas emissions. It says that such an ‘ecological tax reform’ could increase the bloc’s competitiveness by shifting the burden away from labour taxes.

EU heads of state and government, meeting in Brussels on 8-9 March 2007, committed themselves to reducing European CO2 emissions by 20% by 2020 compared with 1990 levels – a bold promise, when one considers that Europe is already struggling to meet its current target, under the Kyoto Protocol, of cutting these emissions by 8% by 2012.

Currently, the EU’s principal tool to reduce emissions is its carbon trading scheme, but the EU will have to find new ways to discourage pollution if it is to reach its ambitious goal. Taxation could provide an answer as it can be used to orient producers’ and consumers’ behaviours to non-environmentally friendly goods.

From http://www.planet2025news.net/ntext.rxml?id=4261&photo=

Member states urged to take action on 'e-waste'

Consumer electronic manufacturers including Sony, Nokia and HP, and NGOs ranging from Greenpeace to Friends of the Earth, have called on the Commission to take action against 11 member states that have transposed the WEEE directive without making producers fully responsible for the recycling of electrical and electronic products.

The Directive on Waste from Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) aims to increase the reuse, recycling and recovery of waste from a variety of consumer products ranging from light bulbs to PCs. Electrical equipment is one of the fastest- growing waste streams in the EU.
The Directive aims to create incentives for producers to take the initiative to improve the design of their products and make them easier to recycle.

From http://www.euractiv.com/en/environment/member-states-urged-take-action-waste/article-162349


Snack-maker aims for green consumers with carbon labels
By Fiona Harvey,Environment Correspondent, Financial Times

Packets of Walkers crisps will appear on the shelves today carrying the world's first "carbon labels", enabling customers to gauge the effect of their buying habits on the climate.
The labels will show that 75g of carbon dioxide are emitted to produce and transport 34.5g of Walkers crisps "from seed to store".

Tom Delay, chief executive of the Carbon Trust, thegovernment-funded body that helped to develop the labels, said: "This will be a driver for businesses starting to compete on their carbon footprint as much as on price."

The carbon labels come as companies try to impress their green credentials on environmentally conscious customers. Walkers has been working with the trust for five years and other -companies, including Boots, the retailer, are expectedto launch similar labels soon.
Innocent, the maker of smoothies and fruit juices, will include information on the "carbon footprint" of its products on its website initially, although in the future these could appear on the juice packaging.

Marks and Spencer said yesterday it was also working with the trust on carbon labels for some product lines. Separate from the Carbon Trust's work, Tesco announced earlier this year it would put carbon labels on all of its products, although this could take several years.
Mr Delay said the idea was likely to be adopted more widely: "This is a little beginning to something that could be very big." He said the labels would explain to consumers the CO2emitted from the products, which would enable people trying to buy ethically to choose between different products.

Ben & Jerry's, the ice-cream brand, welcomed the initiative but said it would not put carbon labels on its products until an international standard had been set.
Fiona Dawson, chair of the Food and Drink Federation's sustainability and competitiveness steering group, said: "A single methodology for industry as a whole is essential. This is a complex issue. To be effective, the methodology must be practicable, based upon sound science and easily understood."

Coca-Cola's ethics put to the test in European-wide study

Coca-Cola's performance as an ethically conscious global brand has come under scrutiny in a 15 nation, European-wide study into the soft drinks giant's involvement in social causes and environmental responsibility.

Over two-thirds of respondents questioned whether the company makes a positive contribution to society.The study, which was commissioned by Vlerick Leuven Ghent Management School in Belgium, looked at the Socially Responsible Trading performance of Coca-Cola across 15 major European markets and eight separate consumer groups.

According to the report, more than 40% of respondents felt Coca-Cola was not making a positive contribution to society, with over-three quarters of those polled stating they were prepared to pay more for ethically produced goods.

Additionally, 86% of people surveyed said companies should speak about their charitable work, but a proportion of respondents said "virtue is its own reward".

However, the report warned that brands must be seen to be engaging in social and environmental programmes to remain successful.T

From http://www.planet2025news.net/ntext.rxml?cust=1001&id=4306&url=http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/645693/Coca-Colas-ethics-put-test-European-wide-study/&photo=

Gold Mining on Papua New Guinea - a destructive business at the cost of local environment and an ancient culture















The report by CorpWatch about gold mining on Papua New Guinea is just devastating. It is in every way the stereotype of how everything goes wrong in extractives business. It grasps in a single article what it means for a pacific island with one of the richest eco-systems in the world, with inhabitants living in ancient culture and without cash economy, to be envaded by a western mining giant that only wants the gold. The result is total destruction of the ecosystem that is home to hundreds of unique species, a total clash of local people with the mining company resulting in deaths and armed forces, destruction of the ancient culture and a jump within one generation from stone-age to cash economy.

I just keep asking myself - how can this happen? The worst thing is perhaps that the gold mining company, Canadian Barrick Gold, tried to approach the project with good stakeholder dialogue and fair compensation to local people and landowners. However, in the end, they dramatically failed to treat the island in a fair way as greed for more gold took over the project.

Can it be that no matter how great CSR programs, stakeholder inclusion and dialogue, and fair compensations plans, an extractives industry where a foreign company is extracting natural resources from somebody else's land is incrementally doomed to failure? Why is it that even if environmental damage and lost of land area is accounted for in modern extractives projects, nobody still takes into account the cultural loss and the inevitable conflict that arises from the confrontation of a Western company with ancient cultures living without cash in traditional ways?

Check out the full report on http://corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14381

Open Guest Lecture on February,19th, at Hanken:
Monday 19.2 12.30-14, room 309
Guest Lecturer: Eeva Simola, Finnwatch

Check out Finnwatch at www.finnwatch.org

Some interesting stuff from the website:

• Clas Ohlsonin ja Bilteman myymä kodinelektroniikka sisältää aineita, jotka ovat vaarallisia laitteiden tekijöille ja kuluttajille. Ruotsissa vastikään tehdyissä laboratoriotesteissä on löydettiin korkeita ja kiellettyjä pitoisuuksia lyijyä ja erittäin myrkyllistä raskasmetallia kadmiumia. Korkeat lyijypitoisuudet ovat vaaraksi sekä luonnolle että ihmisille, jotka valmistavat tavaroita Kiinassa. SwedWatchin tuore raportti kertoo, että kummaltakin yritykseltä puuttuu toimiva vaarallisten aineiden valvontaohjelma.
• Neste Oil pyrkii maailman johtavaksi biodieselin tuottajaksi. Se aikoo hankkia tarvittavan palmuöljyn parhailta malesialaisilta tuottajilta. Palmuöljyn nykyisellä tuotannolla on vakavia ympäristövaikutuksia. Kun biopolttoaineiden ja palmuöljyn kysyntä kasvavat, öljypalmuplantaaseja laajennetaan. Osa laajennuksista tapahtuu etenkin Indonesiassa sademetsiin tai turvemaille. Sademetsää raivataan polttaen, mikä lisää kasvihuonekaasupäästöjä ja metsäpaloriskiä. Useat uhanalaiset lajit menettävät elinympäristönsä, hiilinieluja katoaa ja ilmakehään vapautuu metaania. Rekkaralli yksilajisten plantaasien ja öljynpuristamojen välillä on tiuhaa. Euroopan unioni suurimpana ostajana on kaukana, joten myös kuljetuksista jää jalanjälki.

Warren Buffett on Life, Love, Family, Wealth and Value Investing

In a rare interview, Mr Buffett talks about his remarkable career and family. This documentary is about an hour long. Look for his investing tips (on Gillette: "Hair isn't going to stop growing on men's faces and twice as many women's legs"), his views on business ethics, his friends' interviews, and his lifelong love story.

Buffett still lives in the same house he bought in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1958. "It's dumb", he said in an interview, "to let possessions rule you". He has decided to donate most of his wealth to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, combining the wealth of the world's richest and second richest men into one gigantic philantropic effort.

Buffett's children won't inherit any great wealth when he dies. Buffett has said, "There's no reason why future generations of little Buffetts should command society just because they came from the right womb. Where's the justice in that?"

Frankly, I find Buffett's commentary so unique, inspiring and powerful that I'll add one more citation from his Wikipedia page. I'm fully partial: I find this guy remarkable.

"I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I've earned. If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil... I work in a market system that happens to reward what I do very well - disproportionately well. Mike Tyson, too. If you can knock a guy out in 10 seconds and earn $10 million for it, this world will pay a lot for that. If you can bat .360, this world will pay a lot for that. If you're a marvelous teacher, this world won't pay a lot for it. If you are a terrific nurse, this world will not pay a lot for it. Now, am I going to try to come up with some comparable worth system that somehow (re)distributes that? No, I don't think you can do that. But I do think that when you're treated enormously well by this market system, where in effect the market system showers the ability to buy goods and services on you because of some peculiar talent - maybe your adenoids are a certain way, so you can sing and everybody will pay you enormous sums to be on television or whatever -I think society has a big claim on that." (Lowe 1997:164-165)

"I don't have a problem with guilt about money. The way I see it is that my money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society. It's like I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into consumption. If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the GNP would go up. But the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would be keeping those 10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or nursing. I don't do that though. I don't use very many of those claim checks. There's nothing material I want very much. And I'm going to give virtually all of those claim checks to charity when my wife and I die." (Lowe 1997:165-166)