Archive for the 'Business and the Environment' Category

Solid energy buys Canterbury Biodiesel

Published by Ben Kepes on May 9, 2007 in Business, Business and the Environment, Economic Development, New business and Society. 2 Comments

Announced today - Solid Energy purchased Canterbury Biodiesel.

Great to see Biodiesel’s being recongnised as an important, valid and viable energy source for the future. The sooner New Zealand increases it’s tiny current level self-sufficiency in terms of fuel - the better.

Now some of those who protested against the Happy Valley mine (see my post here) might have a difficult decision about whether to chastise SE as devils or applaud them as Eco-warriors!

SE CEO Don Elder is a nice guy (actually Therese Arseneau his wife is nicer but maybe I’m a soft touch for intellectual Canadians) and maybe he’ll get a couple of bouquets rather than the brickbats he’s received of late.

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Rod Oram on Carbon Zero…

Published by Ben Kepes on May 6, 2007 in Business and the Environment, Compliance, New business and Society. 2 Comments

In today’s Sunday Star Times, Rod Oram wrote this opinion piece about what an opportunity Carbon Trading (or at least a carbon trading market) would be for New Zealand.

While his rationale is sound - the fact that we are geographically isolated, need a new business idea that we can get rolling as an early market entrant and have the legal and skill level to get it up and running. However I wonder if he is getting perhaps a little carried away and putting the cart before the horse. Just because NZ has the skills to get the market up and running does not mean it is a solid business proposition per se.

I’m not a climate change sceptic but I do feel that Carbon Trading has the worrying attributes of other sure fire solutions, and it’s astonishingly fast entry into everyday parlance does make one wonder just how thought out a solution it really is.

It seems that Carbon Trading could be easily used as an easy tool to enable businesses to find a marketing advantage and consumers appease their own guilt over their consumption but neither of these two results will actually have a position impact on the environment.

Does anyone else thinks it’s a little too fast for prudence?

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Let’s play spot the incongruity…..

Published by Ben Kepes on May 4, 2007 in Business and the Environment and Society. 1 Comment

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I couldn’t resist snapping a pic of this the other day. For those that don’t know, the bumper sticker protests against Solid Energy’s coal mine at Happy Valley. The car on which the sticker is stuck is a Porsche 911, possibly one of the least energy efficient methods of getting from point A to point B.

Now I’m no economist but it would seem that an energy company’s desire to create an energy source is just a response to an aggregate demand caused by lots of little energy users. Sure sure coal and petrol are two different energy sources but at the end of the day energy is energy - Solid Energy mines coal to supply a demand caused by the growing consumption of “stuff”. Driving an inefficient vehicle from A to B constitutes “stuff” in the wider sense of the word.

No?

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Is Carbon trading the way forward?????

Published by Ben Kepes on April 30, 2007 in Business and the Environment. 0 Comments

For awhile now I’ve been uncomofrtable about the whole carbon trading dialogue - it feels to me like greenwash, whereby middle class consumers can feel themselves absolved of guilt by making some token gestures towards environmentalism. I’m uncomfortable for the same reasons that I’m uncomfortable about Greenpeace membership drives and the plethora of new environmental magazines that seem to be coming onto the market. You know the ones that tell you it’s OK to build a 400 square metre house so long as you don’t use solvent based paints, or that it’s OK going for a weeks holiday to the Gold Coast so long as you use cloth grocery bags when you’re at the supermarket. I’m just not sure about it all.

An article in the NY Times has an interesting take on the whole carbon neutral trend.

I definately believe its something the NZ businesses ashould find out about fully before rushing headlong into. We are lucky here that Landcare, a reputable organisation, is running the CarbonZero service . At least we know that the advice and information we get from them is honest.

Interesting times huh?

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