Categorie: English

  • Autonomous Big City Travel

    A week in Paris has opened my eyes on how inevitable the autonomous driving future really is. I live in the South of Holland and try to live a Practice What You Preach live because I am very concerned by the prospect of what our continued Western lifestyle will mean for the future of planet Earth. So I took the train to Paris for a week long holiday. 
    Traveling by public transportation means planning ahead so days before my trip I looked the departure times of the trains and I got the scare of my life: In order to be in time for my 12:00 pm Thalys from Rotterdam to Paris I had to leave my house at 8 AM because half way my journey a bridge was being repaired. It meant I had to leave 2,5 hours earlier than if trains ran regularly. Just to get to the starting point of my journey.


    I decided that starting the day with the delay risk of 4 train switches was not going to increase my relaxation I decided to drive my hybrid to Rotterdam, create some unnecessary CO₂ and park there. Practice what you preach goes a long way but I don’t go so far as to ridicule myself.
    The Thalys was right on time although I don’t understand why I had to be at the platform half an hour early. The coffee in the station was great and I got on my first High Speed Train ever!
    Within minutes of departure the train was comfortably blasting with 300 km/h in the direction of Paris, first stop Antwerp. There the train had to wait for a full hour because between Antwerp and Bruxelles an accident had happened. 

    This was when I realized how highly inflexible the railway infrastructure really is: hundreds or thousands of people are stranded because somewhere in the system somebody didn’t look out and got run over by a train. All Trains on both sides of the accident have to wait till the track is made available again. On a highway you get a traffic jam but at least 2 of the 3 lanes are usually available shortly after something happens and you can take an exit to drive around a problem.
    Anyways, we arrived fossil free in Paris an hour late. No big deal because I was in holiday mode. The total travelling time (6:40) from my house to Paris was substantially longer than had I driven point to point. How would this travel scenario roll out in a not so distance future autonomous EV world? Would I order a vehicle to bring me from Weert to Paris in 4,5 hours while I was enjoying blogging in the back seat? Absolutely!


    I walked to my hotel with my roller suitcase, enjoying the Big City sound, smell and buzz. My eye immediately caught the numerous Toyota Hybrid cabs (mostly Prius), busses, botched cars and triple wheel motorcycles. My hotel was just ten minutes walking from Gare du Nord, in the middle of a busy neighborhood.
    The next morning I got myself a public transportation chipcard (valid for ten years, 5€) and ordered a 1 week unlimited travel fee for just €23 and was ready to go. Paris had an amazing subway network and you can get from anywhere to anywhere and the frequency of the trains is amazing, can’t remember having to wait more that 3 minutes.


    I really enjoyed the rides to get around town. But once you get back out in the streets you notice that there is an even denser network of buses overlaying the subway network. The sound of the buses is everywhere and the (tourist) buses are followed by at least ten taxis and 50 personal transportation devices (including occasional public bikes). In numerous streets you see really dirty shared public EV’s charging and occasionally you actually see one moving. The idea is cool but who wants to drive such a dirty not looked after piece of shit?


    Paris is a pandemonium of people moving around all the time and I sat down at one cafe to think out this blog….
    Just close your eyes and fast forward 10 years:

    • all the taxis are replaced by autonomous Uber/Tesla EV’s. Not Model S, not model 3, but more something like a Smart. Taking up no space and moving 2 people at a time over empty boulevards
    • All the dirty public EV’s are gone, because they are charged and maintained outside the city 
    • Nobody uses buses because point to point travel with an app is way easier and cheaper
    • No cars parked anywhere
    • Air quality improves big time
    • Noise level improves big time 
    • I think metro will survive because it is already fully electric, quiet, fast and really cheap

    I am sure this city is absolutely ready for this autonomous EV revolution. They have done many experiments with public and shared services and paying for taxis. Autonomous EV’s will revolutionize the Paris experience, in a very good way.
    If you want to enjoy the diesel noise and smoke and a million dented cars, you better hurry, they won’t last.

    PS. For the major Paris : immidiatly forbid new fuel powered two/three wheelers and mandatory replacement by 2020, quickest win for cleaner air and less noise,

  • How much energy will a Fossil Free society need?

    Interesting discussions I have these days. Where climate change deniers usually just ignore the question of energy security (Big Oil will deliver) pro-nuclear folks acknowledge the climate issue and the scale of the needed transformation. That makes them good discussion partners.

    Pro-Nuclear points out that if every kWH of energy used today needs to come from alternatives, “the renewables” are going to be highly inadequate and only nuclear can deliver the required base load. This is where the subject of this blogpost comes from. I want to show that a Fossil Free economy needs massively less energy, that can be supplied by the Renewables.

    The point is that the Fossil economy is exactly that: an economy running on Fossil Fuels so it’s no wonder it uses a lot of energy. But what if we think of a fossil free society, what chunks of energy will just drop out of the equation?
    I don’t have figures (yet) so it’s going to be quantitatively at this moment, if you do have figure please share them with me.

    Mining
    Fossil Mining requires massive amounts of energy, in drilling, blasting, digging, breaking, transporting cleaning and refining. In a FossilFree society the activity ceases to exist. As resources become ever less in quality the energy per unit of product will soar, even to the point where energy out < energy in (only sustainable by accruing debt)

    Transport of energy sources
    Transporting all the fossil fuels uses a lot of energy : truck diesel, train diesel, pipeline pumps….no longer needed

    Fossil mining and transport industry
    Coal diggers, mega trucks, oil tankers, storage tanks, pipelines, deep sea platforms, off shore helicopters, tugboats … Not needed anymore… We will need fewer Iron Works, steel factories, machine factories, maintenance crews, security groups,

    Energy infrastructure
    All the above are hard at work to feed these: the coal plants and oil refineries. No more coal harbors, compression stations, oil refineries. The highly inefficient coal plants and gas stations (turning 50% of the embedded energy into waste heat) can shut down.

    By now we must have saved absolutely massive amounts of “energy”, but it gets better

    Food production
    The world on Fossil Fuels, Monsanto and Unilever is supposed to eat processed foods and minced cows. The embedded energy in a hamburger is absolutely horrifying : the industrial wheat, transported across the globe and made into highly refined flour for the buns, the cows eating fossil fuel created corn that came half way round the world. The whole processing and packaging, freezing and storage industry….. Waste, waste, waste to,create empty calories that turns your body in a hunger machine : waste food in, more hungry feelings within an hour, fat stored in your body. A fossil free society will eat locally produced real food.

    Global transport (sea and air)
    $0,25 garbage toys from Shanghai thrown away broken after 10 minutes, brought into first world harbors by the container load. It will stop. It has no value. Flying on tax free kerosine? A memory of the past. Tickets that have all embedded social costs calculated into them? Unaffordable. Flying as we know it will stop. Massive amounts of energy saved again.

    Civilian transport
    Walkable neighbourhoods, Cities with integrated work/living areas, transport by cycles, e-bikes, EV’s, hybrid busses, light rail. Obscene amounts of energy to be saved here

    Urban transport
    Last mile transport with electric vehicles, absolute nobrainer.

    Household appliances
    PassivHaus, Heatpumps, LED-lighting, hotfill washing machines and dishwashers, OLED-TV’s, 5V central charger with house wide distribution: saving possibilities by the shipload

    Electricity production
    After we’ve created our Fossil Free society we will need some power to keep it going. With all the aluminum smelters and refineries gone we will need energy mostly for households. We make is with wind, solar, biogas, algae diesel, molecular heat storage, hydro, reverse osmosis, tidal and what makes sense locally. The massive amount of EV’s will buffer and redistribute all this abundant energy so that the lights stay on at night and in the winter.

    I’ve fired all the rednecks and oil tanker captains, what are they going to do?

    New industries
    Electricity generation
    Wind farms, Solar PV farms, CSP farms, biomass production……loads of jobs here.

    Electricity storage
    We need bio plant operators and workers to create algae diesel, power2gas, elephant grass, cannabis fibers. We need lots and lots of hands there to maintain these systems.

    Local food
    People will quickly adopt to Grasshoppers (chocolate dipped or plain) and fish. The energy per Calorie is orders of magnitude lower than Fossil Meat. Towns will be full of mixed agricultural activity with chicken and pigs, rooftop agriculture.

    Repair/Circular economy
    Things break, but because in a FF-society we make repairable goods we get a whole, refurbishment industry. Lots of work for creative people. Having a circular economy will keep the energy embedded in products in the system in stead of dumping it in a landfill after initial use.

    Community services
    Because we no longer are relying on Big Banks supported HealthIndustry to “cure” sick people created my Monsanto, McDonalds and Unilever we can have community based health centers where broken bones are healed and I’ll people are cared for regardless of income or social position.

    So the point I’m trying to make is that Nuclear may not be that necessary in a society that said goodbye to Chevron and Shell, maybe we can even do without it as the great yellow fusion reactor gives us way more than we can ever use. Just capture, store en distribute.

    ….And we live happily ever after and tell our children horror stories of the a black world where people believed they needed Hummers to drive 50 miles to Malls to buy new plastic dolls each and every Christmass and eat boxes of Chocolate coated corn flakes jus to be happy.

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  • Pork Cycle meets Peak Oil

    The pork cycle, one of the few credible economic theories I know: a high market price for a product signals producers to invest in production capacity, by the time the capacity is available massive amounts of products enter the market leading to price drops. Prices fall so low that for some producers not even the marginal costs are recovered: they go bust. The stocks of the product run down, prices start rising. Shortages occur signaling producers to…..boom bust repeat

    The fossil energy market has been very different: after the Second World War massive fields were brought into production (Ghawar in Saudi, Texas, later the North Sea, Alaska, GOM) that could be switched into a higher gear by just opening the throttles. The guy with the biggest throttle (Saudi) determined the price, it adjusted the flow of oil (almost realtime) to such a level that the market was (more or less) in balance at a price it desired.

    This worked nicely for over half a century, but then came 2005. Economies were soaring, demand increased to unbelievable levels but Saudi stuttered. It couldn’t open its valves far enough to stabilize the price. Prices started rising. Two years later oil cost 147$ a barrel. Economists (the talking heads on TV) had always said that the global economy ran on 30$ oil. Oops.
    Lehman fell, central banks started to fix the problem with massive amounts of free money for the banks.

    Now a historical interpretation from myself: fracking as technology had been known for a long long time, but it was way too expensive to actually use. The free money flooding the investment market suddenly made fracking viable. BUT:

    Now a technology was introduced into the Fossil Fuel industry that resulted in oilfields without a tap: development was so expensive (way higher than offshore) that production was always flat out from the start.

    We have been in the first up leg of the Fracking Pork Cycle: consistent 100+$ shale oil invited everybody and his mother to start fracking. The market saturated. Saudi now needs every dollar it earns for its exploding population and is NOT throttling back anymore:
    IMG_3813.JPG

    Now let’s apply some economic theory and do some predictions:
    * prices plummet (happening)
    * countries relying heavily on oil revenue (Saudi, Russia) will start looking for ways to increase the oil price : wars in Ukraine and Iraq?
    * countries that dislike Russia and Saudi will do everything they can to keep the market flooded, leading to economic havoc there

    In the long run low prices will kill frackers: their need for free (QE) money is starting to hurt the western economies because low rent causes bad investments being made. Once QE stops fracking instantly dies leading to soaring oil prices, killing western economies.

    My advise? Stop free money, don’t start fracking elsewhere, oil prices will slowly increase. Renewables, already delivering cheaper energy than oil and coal, will quickly pick up the gauntlet. We transform away from fossil society. Russia and Saudi see what’s happening, get a last shipload of money from the expensive oil and can prepare.

    We live long and prosperous and have at least a fighting chance to save the planet. Or so.

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  • Dreaded Demonized Deflation

    When I was al little kid I found German stamps in my grandaddies stamp collection. They were 1 billion Reichs Mark stamps. I was amazed btw the pages full of wealth he possessed. He only lived in a small house, and it wasn’t until High school that I understood why: the stamps were only worth the paper they were printed on. Economics teachers preached that inflation ruins economies, look at Weimar, people ran to the store with their salary to buy goods because their money would be worthless later on the day.

    I started reading newspapers and was utterly confused that governments will do anything possible to create inflation, on the one hand to keep the sheeple poor, on the other hand to hide that our governments have been living on defecit spending for ages. Their wars, megalomanic monuments and other great accomplishments that they want recorded in history are payed by borrowing from us (in The Netherlands we have a mandatory pension plans and the monthly payments are converted to governments loans). The only way governments can pay this money back is by steep inflation that ruins the value of the loans. Nobody in charge says it aloud, but oh boy, they’d love to see those Weimar 10,000% inflation rates! The whole government deficit repaid for the price of 500 stamps!

    And so I was even more surprised to learn that there is one thing that governments dread more than free Marihuana, promiscuous presidents and ISIS incarnations of Guantanamo Bay videos. It’s called DEFLATION.

    Because if the economy gets into a deflationary state (money gaining value as time goes by) the treasurer of the state gets caught with his pants down: the debt has to be payed back eventually. The fact that you and I have to pay back our study loans and mortgages in 30 years means shit to them, not all pigs are born equal. Governments want to have their toys, JSF, Obamacare, bigger-smaller-bigger groups in school, peace keeping missions. That’s what makes their hearts tick faster, not something boring as being a responsible book keeper.

    And so the central banks will use all their (not democratically obtained power) to do whatever it deems necessary, as long as it creates inflation. Inflation keeps dropping due tot the single, double, triple dip. The most logical solution to create inflation is by the Weimar method: print money, drive it to the mall, dump it in the central hall and refill as soon as it’s gone. But that method is not chosen because the 1%’ers don’t go to malls & miss al the fun. Method of choice number two is also not used: rise government employee salaries. No, in stead they give TBTF-banks free money (interest 0%) so that they can “invest” and Trickle Down Economics can once again do its wonders. That it hasn’t worked for 6 years doesn’t mean they’re not going for it with six-fold enthusiasm this time round.

    Al this stupid blindness for the obvious! We the people have been accustomed to hyper deflation for decades and we love it! My first flat fee 64 kbit ISDN subscription cost me 50$ a month, twenty years later I still pay 50$ but I now have a 64 Mbit fiber connection, 1000x the performance same price, hyper deflation! That 47″ LED screen I’ve been dreaming of for over a decade? It cost as much as a kitchen when It came out, and now look, less than 500$! Solar panels on my roof for free energy? Not possible with huge subsidies until recently, now cheaper than electricity from coal, and for sale in the DIY-shop around the corner.

    And so we arrive at “wage restraint”. The ultimate recipe of the Fortune 500 for improving profits, but my salary hasn’t increased with 1$ (nominal) in 5 years and I am DYING for some solid deflation, so I can buy the same number of pies and comic books as I did 5 years ago. Alas, MegaCorp is so addicted to low wages and tax deductions that they don’t know how fast they have to vomit there complaints out over MSM if labour unions try to get the subject on the table.

    And deflation and my savings account? Don’t worry mr minister. I’ve removed my money from my TBTF account and gone into crowdfunding.
    We the people can fix this mess all on our own, we don’t need your monetary policies to get the small businesses back on their feet. Just a little while longer and TBTF is To Big To Be Relevant.

  • An energy source for the industry ? : Lifter Plants – Thorium

    Households will have no issue whatsoever to decarbonize. Their rooftops will catch all the energy they need from Fusion reactor number 1, and community windmills will fill in the gaps when the sun is down. Our Tesla batteries store energy for half a neighborhood and in case we want to go all the way in reliability we will place flow batteries in every street.
    If energy is in tight supply our smart neighborhood net will follow the programmed heuristic to lower power demand by switching of washing machines, boilers and lowering power usage of heat pumps. No doubt in my mind that “we the people” can be fossil free within 15 years. The most expensive part of the energy infrastructure (the low voltage distribution network in towns) will loose their goal and be decommissioned. We only need to connect with our neighbors in a mesh network to distribute our local power.

    Not so for the industry. 365×24 aluminum smelters, paper mills, nuclear fuel processing plants, steel factories, manufacturing industry, they are desperately dependent on stable and MASSIVE amounts of cheap and stable energy. It is this group that screams from the rooftops that “Renewable is not feasible”. It is this group that has the lobby power to keep coal taxes low. It is this group that has Energy Ministers in their pocket to give of fracking permits. I’ve been angry at them, for refusing to modernize, for refusing to rethink, for only thinking about short term solutions.

    But if you truly want the whole world to decarbonize there is no other solution than to think for these mastodons. So last week I came across a solution that is so beautiful in its simplicity that it really a shame that I didn’t come across it earlier**. The reason for this is because when you research the technology Google trashes you with documents laced with these words:
    Forbidden Words
    I’ve made it a picture so Google can’t index them.

    Point is, there this an element number 90 (look it up) that in 100% pure form, when mixed with a minute amount of waste U233 that acts like a catalyst, magically starts to give of HUGE amounts of energy that can be harvested in a completely safe way, without the risks associated with “Fossil” Nuclear Power plants.

    I always used to be very very anti-Nuclear, for the right reasons, but researching Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR, or “lifter”) I must conclude that this technology should really be framed as “iNergy” in an Apple style glamorous setting if it actually made true it’s promises.

    This is because the physics look rock solid based on 100% pure Thorium, accidents like Fukushima can’t happen (no pressure, no massive amounts of radioactive pollutants). And in case of complete systems failure it shuts itself down, even if all pumps were Tsunamied away. It needs Nuclear Waste to get started and burns the shit away if the starting material is 100% pure! The waste that comes out of a Thorium plant (if any) is safer than the ore it originated from within 300 years. Any how, Google Thorium LFTR, ignore the ’50’s and ’60’s frame and look at whats there**

    A rock solid energy source, extremely expensive to develop and based on 100% clean fuel sources, but if we let the MegaCorps bite that bullet (it’s called investing), thats really OK, because they will get what they so desperately need : unmeasurable amounts of free energy! Check it out!

    ** since Thorium is ratio active (it falls apart) 100% pure is not possible and the contaminants make the whole idea utterly unfeasible. That is the reason that after 50 years of research the “fast breeder” reactor was buried on economic grounds. Only India pursuits the idea. And even if it would work it would take centuries to “breed” all the Uranium needed to start these reactors. Looks like industry has to rethink the sun anyways.

  • Stop development of fuel efficient cars (Jevons Paradox)

    The IPCC’s latest report is out and creating a lot of fuzz around the globe. Summary of the report : 2 degrees temperature rise seems inevitable, and to stop temperatures from rising over 4 degrees above pre-industrial levels we need to take serious action, and do that very quickly.

    After I got over my anger of “2 degrees is going to happen anyways” I started thinking about the adapting, coping and mitigating strategies that pop up everywhere.

    Adapting and Coping
    Humans can adapt to climate change quite easily because we can add or remove layers of clothing, make adjustments to our houses (air conditioning) and habits (Siësta). For the one billion people to poor to invest in their well being coping is the paradigm. The fact that ecosystems cannot add air conditioners or take of clothes is hardly mentioned. How we are going to live in a world with failing ecosystems is a complete puzzle for me. But since we are optimistic humans and 99% of us will not live to see the devastated planet we are more than happy to engage in…..

    Mitigating climate change
    Mitigating is taking (in this case) reactive actions to repair something that is broken. What I see happening is that massive amounts of public money will be made available to mega Corporations to develop more fuel efficient engines and coal plants. But there is a problem here, and that’s called Jevons Paradox. This 19th century English economist saw that, as steam engines became more efficient to prevent expenses on coal to explode, the total amount of coal being used INCREASED with engine efficiency, in stead of decreasing. This paradox is rather trivial : as an engine becomes more efficient more people can buy one because operating costs are lower, and so total usage of coal increases. The effects of this paradox were again seen in the oil age.

    Stop investing in fuel efficiency
    And so we come to my main point : pouring massive amounts of public money into fossil fuel energy efficiency research and development is not going to help us one little bit! If we succeed in making cars twice or three times as efficient as today (very well possible if you ask me) then cars will become affordable for billions of Chinese and Indians. Demand for fossil fuels will soar. The same applies for things like gas turbines and airplane engines, and given the building rate of coal plants in China, coal plants too.

    What I want to propose is an outright global ban of further state funded development of fossil technology, be it the mining, storage, transformation or usage technologies. Private (car) companies will of course try to keep market share, and it’s fine if they try to do better, but we must not use public money to help do this. Public funds must be directed towards Fossil Free projects.

    It sounds unrealistic at first, and I was confused by my own idea, but it is really the only way forward to mitigate climate change if you really think about it. So it’s OK to invest in new technologies as long as they stay far away from any fossil fuel involvement.

    Technologies that have a fixed installed base, and no risk of exponential growth that use fossil fuels can be optimized though. I’m thinking that for gas heaters and furnaces in homes it’s OK to make these more efficient, together with enhanced isolation of buildings. The focus should be on net-zero-energy here too, by the way.

    We need to turn our attention to that Yellow Fusion Reactor passing overhead every day screaming : “I’ve powered the human civilization for 50.000 years up till 1750, and I’m willing to do it again!”

    TwitterVolgen

  • Decision making for Junior Venture Capitalists : a model

    How to choose the business opportunities that have a higher chance of succeeding. @MattOgus at TechCrunch proposes to use Multi Factor Decision Analyses:

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    He has a point : following gut feeling or listening to successful people may not be a broad enough basis to base your decisions on.

    Time to beef up my own Excel-sheet for my next investments 🙂

    Read the whole story here

  • On Stakeholder Engagement: do it or they will do it to you

    MOOC’ing my way to a new job in “Sustainability”, and learning lots of interesting stuff. This week had “Stakeholder Engagement” on the menu. We learned about standards for doing this (AA1000ses), reasons to do it and ways on reporting on the interactions with stakeholders and the showing the results. All rather dry and theoretical but interesting anyways.

    I woke up this morning, finding my Twitter timeline filled with references to a Greenpeace report on the sustainability of IT companies. And that put all the newly learned stuff in perspective. This is exactly what stakeholder engagement is about: open, honest reporting on where you stand, what you communicate, what the results are and how you compare to your peers. But Greenpeace reverses the roles, and does a great job at doing so. I work for HP, so you can imagine that I have a story for my boss tomorrow: we need to get our act together, because if we don’t the customer will know where its IT can be serviced in a sustainable way, and believe me, customers are going to make this an important selection criterium.

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  • Monster El Niño beginning to emerge

    Since a couple of weeks I’m following Robert Scribblers website where he describes the building up of a monster El Niño that is bound to influence global weather this and next year.

    The graphs may seam a bit confusing at first, but once you understand what they mean they become self explaining:

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    This is a cross section of the Pacific at the equator. Left is Malaysia right is South America (Equador). Top to bottom is the depth of the upper 500 meter of the ocean. The normal situation is that hot water sits on the left because trade winds blow from east to west and the warm water gathers on the west side of the Pacific. What happens during an El Niño is that suddenly a gush (a really large gush) of heated water “flows back” to the East (beneath the surface) and pops up at the coast of South America, this pulse of hot water is called a Kelvin Wave. When this happens, the sudden pool of hot water (at least 5 degrees warmer than normal, but now even higher) creates dramatic climate affects globally, the last large El Niño in 1997 (the beginning of the temperature “hiatus” for the denialists) caused global temperatures to surge by 1 degree Celcius, cause droughts, heat waves, floods, bad crops and more. This El Niño is set to be larger than that one:

    NB1 : the top picture is of the 1997 El Niño
    NB2 : all pictures show anomalies, the difference with what is normal, so the water flowing east is 6-7 degrees warmer than the water there normally is.

    Read the full story here

  • MOOC @ Bath : Sustainability for Professionals : Week 3 reflection

    This week : Reporting standards

    Good to go through some of these standards. Until recently I was mainly on the “environmental” side of sustainability, but I have learned to appreciate the social aspect of sustainability.

    One thing that keeps coming to my mind, and that is something I hope will come back later in the course, is tooling for delving into the really fundamental questions around sustainability:
    “Is (part of) my company / our industry itself at all sustainable?” and if not (because I am a coal mine or lil company) what can we do to reinvent ourselves, be open and honest about that and show the world that we really care.

    It’s of course really easy for me to ask these questions because I am not a player (yet) but these are the type of questions that keep me wake at night.

    (Some of) the Standards

    EMAS – EU management tooling framework for Environmental Reporting and company policy making. Requires registration. Currently (3-2014) 4500 members.

    ISO26000 – social Responsibility framework (not certifiable)
    BS8900 – sustainable Management (British)
    SA8000 – Social accountability

    Other reporting standards
    PAS2060 (carbon reporting)
    ISO 20121 – Management entertainment industry
    ISO 14001 – Environmental Management System (integral part of EMAS)
    BES 6001 – Responsible SOURCING of construction materials

    On labeling schemes
    Marine Stewardship Council, Fairtrade and other “labels” are intended to help consumers make a “wise choice”, but are they really??

    One issue I see with these labels is that they are “product oriented”, you as a consumer are making a choice between brand A and B. So you read that this meat is “from better kept animals”, but there are no “meta labels” saying “eating meat is far mor damaging to the environment than eating beans and mushrooms”. The latter is necessary to grow to a “sustainable” food supply, “better kept animals” are not going to save the planet.

    Far fetched idea to mitigate this: The supermarket as a whole would need to re-zone their aisles with color codes : RED-floor meaning, don’t buy this stuff if you care about sustainability, and GREEN-floor saying, it’s OK to fill your baskets here. Doubt if it would be a very successful formula though 🙂

    Stakeholders and stakeholder engagement
    The most interesting part of this MOOC until now : stakeholder engagement standard AA1000ses. It defines a process on how to plan, implement, react and report on stakeholder engagement. GOOD STUFF!

    Ideas from fellow student Geoffrey Rowlands on changes required to implement CSR:

    William Bridges is one of the change/transition educators that I admire. He is able to boil complex approaches down to simple questions or steps like:
    1. What is changing?
    2. What will be different because of the change?
    3. Who’s going to lose what?

    “Change” is an event. “Transition” is the evolving process of individuals adapting to the change.

    Or the 4 “P’s” that I have used numerous times. Purpose, Picture, Plan, Part.

    I’ll quote the slide of implementing CSR-sustainability policies in companies because I will want to look this up often

    “Practical considerations include:

    phased development and implementation
    recognition of the need for identifying priorities
    keeping the strategy simple and practical
    starting with easy wins
    recognising the need for a long planning process upfront”

    All in all a very good week, I learned a lot and have lots of new ideas I can chew on!!

    )