World Wildlife Fund rewards greenwashing
October 28, 2007 - 4:40pm
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Some companies provide the environmental groups with contributions or payments for services. Lafarge is paying the WWF about $6 million over three years to help fund environmental programs—not win the environmental group's support, the company says. The WWF stresses that the money hasn't influenced its view of the cement maker, which generates 94.4 million tons of greenhouse gases annually—more than Portugal. Lafarge says it has a "proactive and radical policy to reduce CO2 emissions."
Sony — one of the few companies to factor in the use of its products in calculating greenhouse gas emissions — says its steep rise over the past year is due mostly to robust sales of products like LCD TVs. A spokesman says Sony is committed to reducing CO2 emissions from its offices by 7% by 2010.
Nike announced in 2001 that it would cut by 13% its carbon emissions from a small subset of its operations: Nike-owned facilities and employee travel. Last year the company declared that it had beaten its goal, registering an 18% decline. The WWF, which has advised Nike, gave the company its top 2007 climate prize at the Paris press event. (Nike says it hasn't contributed to the WWF in recent years.)
Source
• Lafarge: Carbon emissions up by 11% over two years.
• Sony: Carbon emissions up by 17% in a one-year span.
• Nike: Overall carbon emissions from operations up by 50% since 1998.
Forest industry eyes carbon-neutral plan. With the support of the WWF.
That is one industry that could do much more then just being carbon neutral. Now if we could figure out what would be required to shut the oil sands down we would be in bussiness.
Way Beyond Greenwashing
by Jonathan Latham
Independent Science News, February 7, 2012
Virtually unnoticed, however, even by their own membership, the world’s biggest wildlife conservation groups have agreed exactly to such a scenario, only in reverse. Led by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), many of the biggest conservation nonprofits including Conservation International and the Nature Conservancy have already agreed to a series of global bargains with international agribusiness. In exchange for vague promises of habitat protection, sustainability and social justice, these conservation groups are offering to greenwash industrial commodity agriculture.
Way Beyond Greenwashing
by Jonathan Latham
Independent Science News, February 7, 2012
Latham’s article is excellent and well worth reading if you haven’t done so already.
In the article, Latham refers to a presentation by Jason Clay, Vice President for Market Transformation at WWF US, given in March 2011. Clay’s presentation outlines WWF’s strategy on REDD: bundling commodities and carbon trading....
But contacting companies individually takes too long. So WWF decided instead to “work with groups”. Hence the “Commodity Roundtables” that WWF has been setting up, to create what Clay describes as “credible standards that companies can buy products against”.
...
But as a look at some of the problems with FSC shows, there are serious problems with the certification approach. And FSC is probably the best of these certification systems. That’s not an endorsement of FSC, by the way, just a recognition that the others are even worse.
Clay and WWF are proposing making a bad situation very much worse. In his 2011 talk, Clay mentions environmental externalities. “One of the problems is that we don’t pay the price of anything we buy, because we don’t pay for environmental externalities. So how can we bring externalities back into pricing?” Clay asks. His answer is to bring carbon into the supply chains.
The argument is that because the commodity roundtables include language about reducing deforestation, there exists the possibility of selling the carbon not emitted bundled into the price of the commodity....
Obviously, there are problems with the suggestion of bundling carbon and commodities, not least of which is working out how much carbon is associated with each commodity and determining what the difference might have been if the commodity had been produced outside the vague rules of the commodity roundtable. Then there’s the fact that the rules are not policed particularly closely. And the fact that trading in something that cannot be measured accurately is an extremely high risk investment. Nevertheless, WWF is ploughing on. In his presentation, Clay explained that,
Clay argues that we can start with carbon, because there already is a carbon market. He appears blissfully unaware of the on-going meltdown in carbon markets. Once the carbon is traded with these commodities, Clay suggests moving on to water, pollinators and biodiversity. “We can widdle away at it, and we can add more things to the price,” he says.
At the end of his presentation Clay asks “Who will manage the planet?” While Clay answers that we all have to, it is obvious from his presentation that Clay and WWF are proposing that corporations, commodity traders and carbon traders should manage the planet. Anyone else think that this is a recipe for disaster?