Gem of the day

Walmart is often held up as a hero of green business - a company that will scale sustainability up to new heights through their aggressive supply chain standards.

Here's what Walmart bought in Mexico using bribes over the past decade:

• $341,000: Sam’s Club built in one of Mexico City’s most densely populated neighborhoods, near the Basílica de Guadalupe, without a construction license, an environmental permit, an urban impact assessment, or even a traffic permit.
• $765,000: A vast refrigerated distribution center built in an environmentally fragile flood basin north of Mexico City, in an area where electricity was so scarce that many smaller developers were turned away. 

Then again, what should we expect from a company that is clearly experienced at dealing with ethical grey areas, as the biggest customer of American gun manufacturer Freedom Group? 

Gem of the day

Breaking down the increasingly artificial barriers between how we define 'developed' and 'developing' countries is getting easier. It's now official that the UK:

• Is in food poverty.Thanks to soaring food prices and shrinking incomes, many families are going through a nutritional recession.
• Is in energy poverty. As the Big 6 utilities continue to increase energy prices by as much as 10% (funny that they all settled on similar hikes at such similar times), 7.2 million households are now living in fuel poverty.
• Is starting to experience water poverty. Scarcity of supply coupled with higher prices has already made 4 million households "water poor".

If that isn't proof to underpin the case for a truly green economy, I don't know what is.

Gem of the day

A classic case of how most big businesses still aren't asking the right questions to drive sustainable innovation at scale (via HBR):

"'What if I can change the game and make a car for one lakh?' Ratan Tata wondered, envisioning a price point of around US$2,500, less than half the price of the cheapest car available...He knew, however, he could still make money if he could increase sales volume dramatically, and he knew that his target base of consumers was potentially huge."

Imagine if Tata had instead asked "What if I can change the game and transform how affordable, healthy and low carbon mobility works in megacities?"

He probably wouldn't have gotten an answer that entailed selling about 170,000 passenger cars per year, flooding India with more traffic, more pollution and a big missed opportunity to transcend the impacts of car-centric development.

Gem of the day

There are many, many things that could be said about Chevron's new Aids Will Lose campaign. Here's one: it's a deliberately designed PR initiative to enhance Chevron's image and distract sustainability critics, after a particularly bad year revealing Chevron and BP represent the worst risk for investors given their respective oil spill records.

Case in point is this Tweet:

On the other hand, with global oil production continuing to plateau and no new conventional reserves in sight, maybe over the next decade it's Chevron that will lose.

That must be what Ian MacDonald, a VP at Chevron meant when he said this at the latest Kurdistan-Iraq Oil & Gas conference:

"I believe all of us stand on the threshold of a great adventure."

Gem of the day

If America's Ivy League universities can't get the intellectual argument behind 350.org's call to divest endowments from fossil fuels, they could at least do the math, right? After all, if schools like Harvard want to be around for another 375 years, it would be smart to recognise that abundant fossil fuels and the dollars attached to them sure won't be.

Or not (via NY Times):

"At colleges with large endowments, many administrators are viewing the demand skeptically, saying it would undermine their goal of maximum returns in support of education."

Even better, a spokesman for Harvard had this to say:

"We always appreciate hearing from students about their viewpoints, but Harvard is not considering divesting from companies related to fossil fuels."

Funnily enough that doesn't really seem to align with Harvard's mission:

"Harvard seeks to identify and to remove restraints on students’ full participation, so that individuals may explore their capabilities and interests and may develop their full intellectual and human potential."

Gem of the day

Case in point for why the sustainability/CSR community is partly responsible for BP's image leading up to Gulf of Mexico:

In 2010, 45% of 'global sustainability experts' polled by Globescan said they thought 'Beyond Petroleum' had an 'effective' or 'average' impact on BP's sustainability performance, despite the company's consistent record of oil spills and lack of serious investment in renewables.