The New Friends of the Earth?
The superstores are suddenly competing to be green.
Can we trust them?
by George Monbiot
Published in the Guardian (January 23 2007)
You batter your head against the door until you begin to wonder whether it is a door at all. Suddenly it opens, and you find yourself flying through space. The superstores' green conversion is astonishing, wonderful, disorienting. If Tesco and Walmart have become friends of the earth, are any enemies left?
These were the most arrogant of the behemoths. They have trampled their suppliers, their competitors and even their regulators. They have smashed local economies, broken the backs of the farmers, forced their contractors to drive down wages, shrugged off complaints with a superciliousness born of the knowledge that they were unchallengeable. For them, it seemed, there was no law beyond the market, no place too precious to be destroyed, no cost they could not pass to someone else.
We environmentalists developed a picture of the world which seemed to be repeatedly confirmed by experience. Big corporations destroy the environment. They are the enemies of society. The bigger they become, the less they can be constrained by either democracy or consumer power. The politics of scale permit them to bully governments, tear up standards, reshape the world to suit themselves.
We also recognised that this was a dialectical process. As businesses began to operate globally, so could the campaigns against them. By improving global communications and ensuring that we could all speak their language, they helped us to confront them more effectively.
But hardly anyone believed that change could happen so fast. Through the 1980s and 1990s, they brushed us off like dust. Then, as a result of powerful campaigns against sweatshops in the US and Europe, some of the big clothing and sports retailers broke ranks. Soon after that, the energy companies started announcing big investments in renewable technologies (though not, unfortunately, any corresponding disinvestments in fossil fuel). But the supermarkets have shifted faster than anyone else. Environmental campaigners are partly responsible (listen to how the superstore bosses keep name-checking the green pressure groups); even so, their sudden conversion leaves us reeling.
Embarrassingly, for those of us who have scorned the idea of corporate social responsibility, some of these companies now claim to be setting higher standards than any government would dare to impose on them. Marks and Spencer, for example, has promised to become carbon neutral and to cease sending waste to landfill by 2012, and to stop stocking any fish, wood or paper which has not been sustainably sourced {1}. Tesco promises to attach a carbon label to all its goods {2}. Walmart now says it will run its US stores entirely on renewable energy {3}.
These standards, moreover, are rather higher than those the British government sets for itself. Marks and Spencer has pledged to use carbon offsets (paying other people to make cuts on its behalf) only as (a last resort) {4}. The government uses them as a first resort {5}. Could it be true, as the neoliberals insist, that markets can do more to change the world than governments?
If so, it reflects democratic failure as much as market success. Held back by forces both real and imagined, politicians have failed to confront the environmental crisis, just as they have failed to tackle inequality, or to challenge the power of the White House, the media barons, the corporations and the banks. The choice between two rival brands of margarine appears to have become more meaningful than the choice between Labour and the Conservatives.
It is also true to say that the Walmart Effect is a real one. When a huge company changes course, the impacts are felt all over the world. One positive decision by the leviathan rumbles more widely than a thousand decisions by its smaller competitors.
But those of us who have fought for the environment and against big business have not yet become redundant. There is plenty to celebrate in the recent announcements and plenty to suspect. Tesco, for example, has made some bold commitments, to which it might eventually be held. At the moment they are weeviled with contradictions and evasions.
In his speech on Thursday, the company's chief executive, Sir Terry Leahy, spoke of the sophisticated new refrigeration techniques Tesco will use, which will allow the chain to reduce its consumption of climate changing gases called hydrofluorocarbons {6}. But at no point did he mention an environmental technology called the door. How can you claim your stores are sustainable if the fridges and freezers don't have doors?
Tesco's press officer was unable to tell me whether the energy savings the company has promised (fifty per cent per square metre by 2010) will be independently audited {7}. If not, the promise is worthless - a company can make any claim it likes if there is no outside body to hold it to account.
Leahy announced that he would respond to one of the biggest complaints of the green groups by cutting the distance that Tesco's products travel, especially by air. He would also switch some of Tesco's road freight (he did not say how much) to rail. But he said nothing about reducing the journeys made by his customers. Shopping accounts for twenty per cent of car journeys in the UK, and twelve per cent of the distance covered {8}. By closing their out-of-town stores and replacing them with warehouses and deliveries, the supermarket chains could both reduce the energy costs of their buildings and (according to government figures) cut the traffic caused by shopping by seventy per cent {9}.
Today the Competition Commission will publish the initial results of its inquiry into the market dominance of the superstores. One of the issues it is investigating is the (land bank) accumulated by Tesco - a huge portfolio of sites on which the company appears to be sitting until it can obtain planning permission. Many of them are out of town. If Tesco develops them, it will drag even more cars onto the road. Out-of-town shopping is incompatible with sustainability.
So, perhaps, is the sheer scale of the business. Walmart and Tesco can change the world at the stroke of a pen, but one decision they will not make voluntarily is to relax their grip on local economies. It will always be harder for small businesses to work with a global behemoth than with the local baker or butcher; Tesco's economy will continue to favour the big, distant supplier over the man down the road. And what of the sense of community independent small shops help to foster, which encourages people to make their friends close to home? If love miles are the most intractable cause of climate change, we need to start cultivating as much community spirit as we can.
But there is a bigger contradiction than this, which has been overlooked by both the supermarkets and many of their critics. (The green movement,) Terry Leahy tells us, (must become a mass movement in green consumption.) {10} But what about consuming less? Less is the one thing the superstores cannot sell us. As further efficiencies become harder to extract, their growth will eventually outstrip all their reductions in the use of energy. This is not Tesco's problem alone: the green movement's economic alternatives still lack force.
The big retailers are competing to convince us that they are greener than their rivals, and this should make us glad. But we still need governments, and we still need campaigners.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Marks and Spencer,15th January 2007. Plan A. http://www2.marksandspencer.com/thecompany/plana/index.shtml
2. Sir Terry Leahy, 18th January 2007. Green Grocer? Tesco, Carbon and the Consumer. Text of speech sent to me by Tesco.
3. Jonathan Birchell, 22nd January 2007. Sun Rises over Wal-Mart's Power Policy. Financial Times.
4. Marks & Spencer, 15th January 2007. Marks & Spencer launches (Plan A)- GBP 200 million 'eco-plan'.
http://www2.marksandspencer.com/thecompany/mediacentre/pressreleases/2007/com2007-01-15-00.shtml
5. See Department of Trade and Industry, July 2006. The Energy Challenge - Energy Review, pages 13 & 51. http://www.dti.gov.uk/files/file31890.pdf
6. Sir Terry Leahy, ibid.
7. Trevor Datson, 19th January 2007.
8. Department for Transport, 2005. Transport Statistics Bulletin, Section 7, Table 7.2.
http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/dft_transstats/documents/page/dft_transstats_039338.pdf
9. S Cairns et al, 2004. Home shopping. Chapter in Transport for Quality of Life, p324. Report to the Department for Transport. The Robert Gordon University and Eco-Logica London, UK. http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/dft_susttravel/documents/page/dft_susttravel_029756.pdf
10. Sir Terry Leahy, ibid.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/01/23/the-new-friends-of-the-earth/
Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html
Can we trust them?
by George Monbiot
Published in the Guardian (January 23 2007)
You batter your head against the door until you begin to wonder whether it is a door at all. Suddenly it opens, and you find yourself flying through space. The superstores' green conversion is astonishing, wonderful, disorienting. If Tesco and Walmart have become friends of the earth, are any enemies left?
These were the most arrogant of the behemoths. They have trampled their suppliers, their competitors and even their regulators. They have smashed local economies, broken the backs of the farmers, forced their contractors to drive down wages, shrugged off complaints with a superciliousness born of the knowledge that they were unchallengeable. For them, it seemed, there was no law beyond the market, no place too precious to be destroyed, no cost they could not pass to someone else.
We environmentalists developed a picture of the world which seemed to be repeatedly confirmed by experience. Big corporations destroy the environment. They are the enemies of society. The bigger they become, the less they can be constrained by either democracy or consumer power. The politics of scale permit them to bully governments, tear up standards, reshape the world to suit themselves.
We also recognised that this was a dialectical process. As businesses began to operate globally, so could the campaigns against them. By improving global communications and ensuring that we could all speak their language, they helped us to confront them more effectively.
But hardly anyone believed that change could happen so fast. Through the 1980s and 1990s, they brushed us off like dust. Then, as a result of powerful campaigns against sweatshops in the US and Europe, some of the big clothing and sports retailers broke ranks. Soon after that, the energy companies started announcing big investments in renewable technologies (though not, unfortunately, any corresponding disinvestments in fossil fuel). But the supermarkets have shifted faster than anyone else. Environmental campaigners are partly responsible (listen to how the superstore bosses keep name-checking the green pressure groups); even so, their sudden conversion leaves us reeling.
Embarrassingly, for those of us who have scorned the idea of corporate social responsibility, some of these companies now claim to be setting higher standards than any government would dare to impose on them. Marks and Spencer, for example, has promised to become carbon neutral and to cease sending waste to landfill by 2012, and to stop stocking any fish, wood or paper which has not been sustainably sourced {1}. Tesco promises to attach a carbon label to all its goods {2}. Walmart now says it will run its US stores entirely on renewable energy {3}.
These standards, moreover, are rather higher than those the British government sets for itself. Marks and Spencer has pledged to use carbon offsets (paying other people to make cuts on its behalf) only as (a last resort) {4}. The government uses them as a first resort {5}. Could it be true, as the neoliberals insist, that markets can do more to change the world than governments?
If so, it reflects democratic failure as much as market success. Held back by forces both real and imagined, politicians have failed to confront the environmental crisis, just as they have failed to tackle inequality, or to challenge the power of the White House, the media barons, the corporations and the banks. The choice between two rival brands of margarine appears to have become more meaningful than the choice between Labour and the Conservatives.
It is also true to say that the Walmart Effect is a real one. When a huge company changes course, the impacts are felt all over the world. One positive decision by the leviathan rumbles more widely than a thousand decisions by its smaller competitors.
But those of us who have fought for the environment and against big business have not yet become redundant. There is plenty to celebrate in the recent announcements and plenty to suspect. Tesco, for example, has made some bold commitments, to which it might eventually be held. At the moment they are weeviled with contradictions and evasions.
In his speech on Thursday, the company's chief executive, Sir Terry Leahy, spoke of the sophisticated new refrigeration techniques Tesco will use, which will allow the chain to reduce its consumption of climate changing gases called hydrofluorocarbons {6}. But at no point did he mention an environmental technology called the door. How can you claim your stores are sustainable if the fridges and freezers don't have doors?
Tesco's press officer was unable to tell me whether the energy savings the company has promised (fifty per cent per square metre by 2010) will be independently audited {7}. If not, the promise is worthless - a company can make any claim it likes if there is no outside body to hold it to account.
Leahy announced that he would respond to one of the biggest complaints of the green groups by cutting the distance that Tesco's products travel, especially by air. He would also switch some of Tesco's road freight (he did not say how much) to rail. But he said nothing about reducing the journeys made by his customers. Shopping accounts for twenty per cent of car journeys in the UK, and twelve per cent of the distance covered {8}. By closing their out-of-town stores and replacing them with warehouses and deliveries, the supermarket chains could both reduce the energy costs of their buildings and (according to government figures) cut the traffic caused by shopping by seventy per cent {9}.
Today the Competition Commission will publish the initial results of its inquiry into the market dominance of the superstores. One of the issues it is investigating is the (land bank) accumulated by Tesco - a huge portfolio of sites on which the company appears to be sitting until it can obtain planning permission. Many of them are out of town. If Tesco develops them, it will drag even more cars onto the road. Out-of-town shopping is incompatible with sustainability.
So, perhaps, is the sheer scale of the business. Walmart and Tesco can change the world at the stroke of a pen, but one decision they will not make voluntarily is to relax their grip on local economies. It will always be harder for small businesses to work with a global behemoth than with the local baker or butcher; Tesco's economy will continue to favour the big, distant supplier over the man down the road. And what of the sense of community independent small shops help to foster, which encourages people to make their friends close to home? If love miles are the most intractable cause of climate change, we need to start cultivating as much community spirit as we can.
But there is a bigger contradiction than this, which has been overlooked by both the supermarkets and many of their critics. (The green movement,) Terry Leahy tells us, (must become a mass movement in green consumption.) {10} But what about consuming less? Less is the one thing the superstores cannot sell us. As further efficiencies become harder to extract, their growth will eventually outstrip all their reductions in the use of energy. This is not Tesco's problem alone: the green movement's economic alternatives still lack force.
The big retailers are competing to convince us that they are greener than their rivals, and this should make us glad. But we still need governments, and we still need campaigners.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Marks and Spencer,15th January 2007. Plan A. http://www2.marksandspencer.com/thecompany/plana/index.shtml
2. Sir Terry Leahy, 18th January 2007. Green Grocer? Tesco, Carbon and the Consumer. Text of speech sent to me by Tesco.
3. Jonathan Birchell, 22nd January 2007. Sun Rises over Wal-Mart's Power Policy. Financial Times.
4. Marks & Spencer, 15th January 2007. Marks & Spencer launches (Plan A)- GBP 200 million 'eco-plan'.
http://www2.marksandspencer.com/thecompany/mediacentre/pressreleases/2007/com2007-01-15-00.shtml
5. See Department of Trade and Industry, July 2006. The Energy Challenge - Energy Review, pages 13 & 51. http://www.dti.gov.uk/files/file31890.pdf
6. Sir Terry Leahy, ibid.
7. Trevor Datson, 19th January 2007.
8. Department for Transport, 2005. Transport Statistics Bulletin, Section 7, Table 7.2.
http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/dft_transstats/documents/page/dft_transstats_039338.pdf
9. S Cairns et al, 2004. Home shopping. Chapter in Transport for Quality of Life, p324. Report to the Department for Transport. The Robert Gordon University and Eco-Logica London, UK. http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/dft_susttravel/documents/page/dft_susttravel_029756.pdf
10. Sir Terry Leahy, ibid.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/01/23/the-new-friends-of-the-earth/
Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html
posted by Bill Totten at
3:14 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home