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Australia has some prominent AGW deniers such as Bob Carter and Ian Plimer. They also have genuine working climate scientists (a few of the younger ones were featured in the rap video I blogged about recently) and the Australian Climate Commission who have just published a report entitled The Critical Decade. This is how they introduce it:
“Over many decades thousands of scientists have painted an unambiguous picture: the global climate is changing and humanity is almost surely the primary cause. The risks have never been clearer and the case for action has never been more urgent.
Our Earth’s surface is warming rapidly and we can already see social, economic and environmental impacts in Australia.
Failing to take sufficient action today entails potentially huge risks to our economy, society and way of life into the future.
This is the critical decade for action”
Take that, deniers (particularly Baudains and Fergusson)!
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In 2008 Ecuador recognized the legal rights of Mother Earth in its new constitution. Article 1 of the new “Rights for Nature” chapter of the Ecuador constitution reads: “Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution. Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public bodies.”
Also group of countries led by Bolivia have recently brought the issue to the agenda of the UN General Assembly as they ask for a UN treaty that would grant the same rights found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to Mother Nature so there will be legal systems to maintain balance between human rights and what they say are the rights of other members of the Earth, such as plants, animals and terrain.
Taken from businessethicsnetwork.org
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The Thoughtful Bread Company claims to be England's first fully sustainable bakery.
click link for article The old school bread of the future
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One-third of the world's food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted each year, according to a study (pdf) released on Wednesday by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
source: Guardian – news - global development
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Bankers aren’t always evil… On May 18th the global finance giant Bank of America announced that it has set a goal of reducing its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 15 per cent by 2015 based on the company’s 2010 baseline. It’s not enough but it’s not bad for a start
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In a speech in early May Levi Strauss & Co. CEO and President John Anderson urged the clothing industry to adopt a new level of social, economic and environmental sustainability, moving beyond compliance with site-specific regulations to encompass improvements in the daily lives of workers in the global supply chain.
Puma is the first company in the world to put a value on the ecosystem services it uses to produce its sports shoes and clothes. In a huge leap for CSR, the company has published an economic valuation of the environmental impacts caused by greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) and water consumption along its entire supply chain. It plans to become even more ambitious by integrating both its social and economic impacts.
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Taken from the New York Times May 3rd 2011 (click for original article).
The population of the world, long expected to stabilize just above 9 billion in the middle of the century, will instead keep growing and may hit 10.1 billion by the year 2100, the United Nations projected in a report released Tuesday.
“Growth in Africa remains so high that the population there could more than triple in this century, rising from today’s one billion to 3.6 billion, the report said”
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We’re already using up Earth’s resources 1.5 times as fast as Earth can regenerate them. Dickens’ Mr Micawber summed up the inevitable result:
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery”
source:Global Footprint network. http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/world_footprint/
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Even Kentucky Fried Chicken is getting in on sustainability and CSR as far as one of their latest restaurants is concerned. KFC’s newest restaurant in Indianapolis is designed to use 25 percent less energy and water. The Indianapolis restaurant is part of KFC’s E3 initiative “which looks at Economically responsible ways of saving energy and being environmentally aware. Many corporations are now far in front of where government is in pro-active action. However, KFC still have the same rather less responsible menu.
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