Good  News

According to a New York Times article, “A USA Today/Gallup poll conducted in January found that 83 percent of Americans want Congress to pass legislation promoting alternative energy, and a recent poll by the Opinion Research Corporation found that almost two-thirds want the Environmental Protection Agency to be more aggressive.” This is the good news.

Bad News

The bad news is in the same story:  “Saying no to mainstream climate science, notes Daniel J. Weiss, a senior fellow and director of climate strategy for the Center for American Progress, is now a required practice for Republicans eager to play to an emboldened conservative base…It’s seen as another way for government to control people’s lives. It’s become a cultural issue.” As the article makes clear, “since taking over the House of Representatives, the Republicans have packed science-related committees with lawmakers who refute such basic findings as the reality of global warming and the threats of climate change. Fred Upton, the head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has said outright that he does not believe that global warming is man-made.

Tying it to what is going on with Google search traffic, from the handy Google traffic estimator and keyword tools (part of Google Adwords), 18,100 U.S. folks search on ‘alternative energy sources’ about half the number on “global warming hoax” at 33,100, but nearly double that number (90,500) search on both global warming facts and variations of the phrase. Global search on global warming is 2,740,000 with  1,000,000 in U.S. while as noted above 63% of the estimated traffic on Google for “global warming hoax” is coming from the United States.

The EPA weighs in at 1.5M with over 800,000 in the United States.

What the EPA Website says about global warming would be important in terms of citizen education. What does it say?

Global warming is part of the special section on climate change. It is part of climate change because climate change addresses a broader range of  issues, not just temperature change, and as the site notes causes of these changes are the “human activities that change the atmosphere’s makeup (e.g, burning fossil fuels) and the land surface (e.g., cutting down forests, planting trees, building developments in cities and suburbs, etc.). As to global warming the site defers to the “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scientists who believe that it is very likely (greater than 90 percent chance) that most of the warming we have experienced since the 1950s is due to the increase in greenhouse gas emissions from human activities.”

No wonder the climate change deniers want to ax the EPA.  It’s a major source of Web public education on the subject, thank heavens, as well as a host to a wide range of initiatives to address climate change.

If we are to increase sustainability awareness, it will be necessary for organizations in the non-profit sector including educational institutions to adopt Web 2.0 tools and techniques. What are they? I find McKinsey Consulting group has the best handle on this topic and highly recommend their annual and interative report, Business and Web 2.0.

Start with understanding the tools most useful and begin a conversation in your organization if you are not using the top four. With so much emphasis on social media it is easy to loose site of the basics in terms of communications infrastructure. There is free software support out there for the top four and many community resources for help on getting your feet wet.

Here are the top four:

Each year since 2005 Corporate Knights, the magazine for clean capitalism, announces the Global 100 which are “the global corporations which have been most proactive in managing environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues.  The team that crunches the numbers is composed of Inflection Point Capital Management—a sustainability-focused asset management venture founded by Dr. Matthew Kiernan, Legg Mason’s Global Currents Investment Management, and Phoenix Global Advisors LLC (a consulting and technology platform focused on sustainability).

Eleven UK companies, two Brazilian, six Australian, five French, three German, nineteen Japanese, and these thirteen U.S. companies:

VIRTUOUS CYCLE

The motivation for doing this list, which follows an interesting methodology, is to mainstream “sustainability in the business community by applying objective corporate social and environmental measures that clearly show which companies stand above their peers, our aim is to create a virtuous cycle where the most sustainable companies attract the most capital and earn the best returns. The Global 100 companies deserve to be recognized, because they are models for the art of the possible, living proof of how billion dollar entities can squeeze more wealth from less material resources while honouring the social contract.”

It’s hard to argue against this intention so I think the best thing to do is circulate the list as far and wide as possible and hear what people from the social, environmental, cultural and economic perspectives of sustainability have to say about the companies on this list.

The key performance indicators (KPI’s) are very interesting and deserve some attention:

Noted by the authors was two fundamental limitations of corporate sustainability research:

1. A lack of ESG data persists despite the growing importance of sustainability to the corporate world.
2. No single sustainability research provider is currently able to provide a total picture of global corporate sustainability due to coverage gaps and methodological biases.

All in all it is a very interesting process and the conclusions need to be subject to scrutiny, but the intention is there to take sustainability awareness and adoption mainstream and what makes this an objective, rather than a mission or goal, are measurements and feedback loops.

NOTE MORE REPORTS

Weekly reports will be issued over the month of February in three installments (Environment, Social and Governance) covering each of the 10 specific key performance indicators plus the transparency metric. On February 28, the full suite of indicators will be made available for download in xls format from www.global100.org

Dominique Conseil was interviewed by me at the 4th Annual International Business and Sustainability Conference sponsored by The Center for Global Leadership in Sustainability at the School of Business Administration at Portland State University.  View his interview on EarthSayers.tv, Culture and Consciousness special collection. Dominique is Global President of Aveda and an earthsayer, a voice of sustainability.

Many people from a wide range of professions and including members of my own family are under the impression that the indicators used by scientists to talk about the hazards of climate change and the effects of global warming are just part of a normal pattern and while we are on a downward slope just now, it’s a dip leading to an upturn as we adjust some of our behaviors, push technology, and extract natural gas as the alternative to our oil depletion problems.

Here are two videos featuring the natural scientist, William Steffen, that I recommend to these many people who are being unduly influenced by shows on TV to include the History channel that take a dim view of the science and pass on information that is not supported by any kind of evidence or actual experience.

In the first, Economic Transformation Not Enough, Professor Steffen talks about how we are “eating into the capital of the Earth” and increasingly becoming more self aware about what is happening, climate change being an example and bidiversity loss another major one. He identifies flash points where too fast and too great of change may lead to collapse, and at the end emphasizes that he believes the future wil depend on some very fundamental things, not just on economic instruments or new rules and regulations, but the nature of our aspirations, our values, our preferences and our choices. It will take nothing less than a transformation to avoid a collapse scenario.

The second, Shaping the Future, is less facts, less lecture, less information, but more optimism, still emphasizing transformation.

I agree with the Professor and am working on EarthSayers.tv to be a “wikipedia” of sustainability advocates to those who are searching on the Web for information about sustainability – challenges and opportunities. I feel very strongly that by bringing the unfiltered voices, rather than text, to the fore the values, aspirations, preferences and choices of those transforming our society will be heard and shared along with the ideas, programs, initiatives, theories, rules, instruments, and products of change.  Our emphasis, though, is on the people, not organizations, not networks, not institutions. Ultimately, the transformation starts with each of us becoming aware and changing our lifestyles.  This is a theme heard across the sustainability landscape and captured on EarthSayers.tv, the voices of sustainability.  It’s all about You.

In November, 2008 I wrote a short paper on Prosperity, one of four elements of sustainability.   I referenced our mission of increasing sustainability awareness, awareness being the number one inhibitor to change.

“I had no idea it was so serious.”

At that time I noted that search traffic on Google, an awareness indicator, was at 30M.  Today it’s still at 30M.

As organizations adopt sustainability strategies, the news and conversations emanating from these actions increase the search traffic on Google, so the “buzz” hasn’t increased much. Two years ago, the U.S. was sixth in search traffic on the term, behind the U.K, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. A measurement of our success for the mission of increasing sustainability awareness was moving the U.S. from sixth to first. Over the period of the last twelve months the U.S. is in ninth place, according to Google Analytics. Interest in sustainability in Asia is rising.

A Reuters report last month referenced a study by the UK-based analyst firm Verdantix. They reported “the United States’ spending on sustainable business will double to $60 billion by 2014 from the current $28 billion.” Verdantix director, David Metcalfe also noted, “In the U.S. market, executive awareness of the business benefits of sustainability is on the rise.

Awareness rising in business circles is a positive sign, yet overall the stagnant numbers on search traffic suggest our citizens are not being motivated to learn more about sustainability and are not active in the learning cycle. Once an individual searches on the term, he or she has entered the learning cycle and on the path to sustainability adoption at some or all levels – personal, business, community.

We are embarking on a more aggressive campaign to involve more partners in our quest to grow EarthSayers.tv and stimulate sustainability awareness and adoption.