g-Think | Issue 17 | The Green Wild West

2007 marked a turning point in the age of green. It was the year green entered the mass-market and Awakening Consumers became a real force to be reckoned with. In the business world, 2007 was also the year of green fervor as companies fell over themselves to become environmentally—and socially—responsible. Promoting green corporate credentials is big business, and in 2007 an entire industry emerged to market and consult on green issues. Certificates of greenness began appearing on virtually every type of consumer product and service. Companies boasted about their newfound empathy with the environment in full-page ads in newspapers, and green awards were handed out every other week by organizations setting themselves up as the arbiters and certifiers of green.

g-Think’s view is that 2007 was actually the year of the green Wild West—a virtual free-for-all where boosterism trumped reality, laissez-faire ruled and accountability was in short supply. As the brakes go on the U.S. economy in 2008, consumers reign in their spending and more evidence comes in about the dire state of the world’s environment, g-Think predicts that 2008 will emerge as the year of green accountability—where green boosterism is subject to scrutiny, consumers become ever more green savvy, the pressure goes on politicians to act and corporations are forced to stand by their green claims. Meanwhile, as stock markets stagger into 2008 commentators in Europe and the U.S. look warily to a growing boom in capital raisings for alternative energy companies with unproven technologies or based on solutions yet to be invented. Anticipate a green pitch from your financial advisor real soon.

In the age of green, consumers face a dizzying array of green claims, green certification standards and just plain green hype. Even for Awakening Consumers who make deliberate decisions on a daily basis, adjusting purchasing choices towards a greener option, life can be extremely confusing. I was reminded of this while attending the major green-building products show, which is held in San Francisco. Arriving at the convention center I was confronted by scary-looking apparitions covered with long hair on roller-skates—The Green Guerrillas Against Greenwash (GGAG). These hairy monsters were protesting the sponsorship of the event by the local utility company, Pacific Gas and Energy—a company that the Green Guerrillas accuse of being anti-solar, pro-nuclear and pro-fossil fuels. For a fleeting moment I felt guilty walking into the show. What if the Green Guerrillas were right and this was all just a sham to provide green respectability to a major polluter and consumer of fossil fuels?

As it turns out, I am not the only one having difficulty reconciling the hype with the reality. The cover story of a recent edition of Business Week focused on the “Little Green Lies” involved in the so-called greening of companies. Companies can boast they’re green, can present cool graphs and charts and can say green produces a return on investment, and they can lower emissions by trading carbon credits. In reality, not much changes: companies keep producing, we keep consuming and CO2 levels keep rising.

The worst thing that can happen is that consumers, including large numbers of awakening consumers, will be put off by all the hype, become thoroughly confused and decide it’s someone else’s problem. All the great work done to date to try and educate consumers, to provide them with real choices and alternatives to be green, will have been in vain. We simply can’t afford to let this happen.

Luckily, the green building show I attended helped allay my fears. It’s hard not to come away from an event like this and realize green is becoming mainstream. But it also brought to light some important issues we, in the business of green, need to confront pretty quickly.

Certification Overload
Strolling around the booths I noticed virtually all vendors from green realtors to companies selling water-efficient toilets and snazzy eco-friendly countertops have some kind of green stamp of approval on their products. Collectively, the show presented a dizzying array of labels, logos and stamps of approval. I was also struck by the range of government agencies, industry groups and nonprofit organizations offering certification of some kind or another, begging the questions:

Just whose standards are being applied?
Who is certifying the certifiers?
Who is ultimately responsible for ensuring that everyone’s on the same page?
How can we ensure that not just anyone can stick a label on something and declare it “green?”

In other words, where is the accountability?

The same situation applies in a host of other industry sectors—travel, food, transportation—wherever companies are attempting to affix green labels and products to their services.

The Murkiness of Carbon Trading and Offsetting
Carbon trading has been eagerly taken onboard by numerous corporations as a way to offset their carbon emissions. Most of the time companies purchase renewable energy credits, which can be sold to someone else who will take the actual green step—plant some trees or do some other action to alleviate CO2 in the atmosphere. But the fact of the matter is that most companies involved in these schemes are not actually reducing emissions or energy usage at all. They’re simply passing this on to someone else. And, what’s more, who ensures that the offsets or credits are actually put to their intended use? Again, it’s an issue of accountability: Who is accountable to whom?

Some commentators on carbon offsetting have pointed to the difficulty of actually coming up with a reliable formula for carbon offsetting and trading. The same applies to carbon footprinting: What standards are being used to determine a product or service’s carbon footprint? Tesco, the large UK supermarket chain, is attempting to assign a carbon footprint to all its products. But, again, there are few agreed-upon standards and no national or international agencies to oversee these schemes.

Passing the Guilt On
Passing the guilt on appears to be the modus operandi of our age. We see it in our political life, where “the buck stops here” seems like a quaint old aphorism from the 1950s. We see it in the media and entertainment, where instead of facing up to misdeeds, high-profile celebrities reinvent themselves. In the corporate world, we see it in the spin and hype attached to corporate social responsibility and environmental stewardship. At the consumer level, we see it in an increased proclivity to buy our way out of the problem: spend a little more on organic food or buy a hybrid vehicle and the problem will go away. Support the products from a company that practices carbon trading and there’ll be less CO2 in the atmosphere. This is not the way it works.

The End of the Green Wild West?
As our green age matures (clearly a good thing for us all in the long run), it is time to take a breath, restore some sensibility and ask some very tough questions as to just what we want our green future to be. Companies need to become accountable for their green pronouncements (which also means nonprofits and interest groups need to reassess how they grade companies on environmental commitments and consumers need guidance on how they can effectively participate in the green economy.

This issue of g-Think explores accountability in the age of green from a number of perspectives. We explore the concept of certification overload and who is certifying the certifiers, fair trade in coffee as a good example of certification, greenwashing and travel, and who is being held accountable for environmental standards in the travel industry, and the great toilet tissue scam down under, plus much more.