Corporate Citizenship

Though the exact details are yet to be finalised, mandatory carbon reporting looks set to become a reality for large UK businesses.
But carbon is a tricky subject. To give confidence in the numbers, a credible stamp of approval, such as an independent assurance statement, is often valued by the analysts and investors who rely [...]

It’s good news. Carbon arguments aside, VW’s announcement of its imminent single passenger, all-electric vehicle seems to tick all the right boxes. It’s good for sustainable mobility. It’s good for local air quality issues in cities, especially London. Britain’s capital has been notoriously in breach of European air quality limits for some time.
On cars, the [...]

Trivial? So it would seem.
Australia’s anticipated move to force companies to label the palm oil content of their products may at first glance appear to be trivial, especially when trying to address a massive problem like tropical deforestation. But is it?
Rather unexpectedly, the Australians seem to have done something no one else has. Whilst most [...]

Shareholders anxious about Fracking?
 Perhaps they should be.
The controversial practice of pumping high-pressured water and chemicals deep underground to break-up shale rock, releasing any contained natural gas in the process, is already banned in a number of US states and France. The procedure also caught the headlines earlier this week when a new ‘fracking’ mine supposedly [...]

What do Nestle, higher food prices, the Middle East crisis and Boeing, all have in common?
The linkages are not immediately obvious, but with companies as distinct as Nestle and Boeing representing opposite sides of the biofuels debate, it becomes abundantly clear that the arguments are complex and that there are no easy fixes to some [...]

The UK’s Parliamentary Committee on Climate Change concluded in its first annual report in October that a “step change” was needed in the pace of emissions reductions in order to meet Government’s targets. Although the economic recession has helped dampen emissions, the UK does not appear to be on track to meet its longstanding 20% [...]

In the US, notwithstanding gains made by natural gas in the last decade, coal is still king. Approximately 49% of US electricity is powered by coal, down only 2% in the last 10 years despite the lower marginal cost of additional gas-fired generating capacity, and a number of initiatives at a state and federal levels [...]

Well debate surrounding anthropogenic climate change continues. On the same day the US Senate voted on Obama’s climate change and energy bill (26 June 2009), the NY Times published this article flagging unofficial dissent coming through from two economists within the US EPA organisational structure. The discord of their views with the official EPA position [...]