The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) has released its scorecard for the forthcoming federal election, and will update it weekly. With only 3 weeks to go, the three major political parties have clearly put entirely different emphases on the importance of the world in which we live. Which best suits you?
Research on Behaviour, Ethics and Climate Change
This is an article “We Cannot Fight Climate With Consumerism” by George Monbiot from his ZSpace Page, Monday, November 09, 2009 http://www.zcommunications.org/we-cannot-fight-climate-with-consumerism-by-george-monbiot.
It outlines and gives examples of the ‘licensing effect’: Researchers have found that buying green can establish the moral credentials that license subsequent bad behaviour.
“How many times have you heard the argument that small green actions lead to bigger ones?”
“I’ve heard it hundreds of times: habits that might scarcely register in their own right are still useful because they encourage people to think of themselves as green, and therefore to move on to tougher actions.”
“A green energy expert once tried to convince me that even though rooftop micro wind turbines are useless or worse than useless in most situations, they’re still worth promoting because they encourage people to think about their emissions. It’s a bit like the argument used by anti-drugs campaigners: the soft stuff leads to the hard stuff.”
“I’ve never been convinced by this argument. In my experience, people use the soft stuff to justify their failure to engage with the hard stuff. Challenge someone about taking holiday flights six times a year and there’s a pretty good chance that they’ll say something along these lines:
I recycle everything and I re-use my plastic bags, so I’m really quite green.”
“A couple of years ago a friend showed me a cutting from a local newspaper: it reported that a couple had earned so many vouchers from recycling at Tesco that they were able to fly to the Caribbean for a holiday.”
“The greenhouse gases caused by these flights outweigh any likely savings from recycling hundreds or thousands of times over, but the small actions allow people to overlook the big ones and still believe that they are environmentally responsible.”
“Being a cynical old git, I have always been deeply suspicious of the grand claims made for consumer democracy: that we can change the world by changing our buying habits. There are several problems with this approach:
• In a consumer democracy, some people have more votes than others, and those with the most votes are the least inclined to change a system that has served them so well.
• A change in consumption habits is seldom effective unless it is backed up by government action. You can give up your car for a bicycle – and fair play to you – but unless the government is simultaneously reducing the available road space, the place you’ve vacated will just be taken by someone who drives a less efficient car than you would have driven (traffic expands to fill the available road-space). Our power comes from acting as citizens – demanding political change – not acting as consumers.
• We are very good at deceiving ourselves about our impacts. We remember the good things we do and forget the bad ones.”
“I’m not saying that you shouldn’t always try to purchase the product with the smallest impact: you should. Nor am I suggesting that all ethical consumption is useless. Fairtrade products make a real difference to the lives of the producers who sell them; properly verified goods – like wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council or fish approved by the Marine Stewardship Council – are likely to cause much less damage than the alternatives. But these small decisions allow us to believe that our overall performance is better than it really is.”
“So I wasn’t surprised to see a report in Nature this week suggesting that buying green products can make you behave more selfishly than you would otherwise have done. Psychologists at the University of Toronto subjected students to a series of cunning experiments (pdf). First they were asked to buy a basket of products; selecting either green or conventional ones. Then they played a game in which they were asked to allocate money between themselves and someone else. The students who had bought green products shared less money than those who had bought only conventional goods.”
“The researchers call this the “licensing effect”. Buying green can establish the moral credentials that license subsequent bad behaviour: the rosier your view of yourself, the more likely you are to hoard your money and do down other people.”
“Then they took another bunch of students, gave them the same purchasing choices, then introduced them to a game in which they made money by describing a pattern of dots on a computer screen. If there were more dots on the right than the left they made more money. Afterwards they were asked to count the money they had earned out of an envelope.”
“The researchers found that buying green had such a strong licensing effect that people were likely to lie, cheat and steal: they had established such strong moral credentials in their own minds that these appeared to exonerate them from what they did next. Nature uses the term “moral offset”, which I think is a useful one.”
“So perhaps guilt is good after all. Campaigners are constantly told that guilt-tripping people is counterproductive: we have to make people feel better about themselves instead. These results suggest that this isn’t very likely to be true. They also offer some fascinating insights into the human condition. Maybe the cruel old Christian notion of original sin wasn’t such a bad idea after all.”
I disagree with the last sentence, and I feel that the research suggests striving for continual balance of “telling it like it is” in appropriate doses that won’t overwhelm and cause inaction, with giving hope when these new realistic actions are done.
Indoor plants make buildings safer
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are found in concentrations consistently higher indoors (up to ten times higher) than outdoors. These cause significant health risks. Now scientific research has confirmed that the solution is in many common, easy-care indoor plants.
VOCs include a variety of chemicals, some of which may have short- and long-term adverse health effects. VOCs are emitted by a wide array of products numbering in the thousands. Examples include: paints and lacquers, paint strippers, cleaning supplies, pesticides, building materials and furnishings, office equipment such as copiers and printers, correction fluids and carbonless copy paper, graphics and craft materials including glues and adhesives, permanent markers, and photographic solutions.
Symptoms from VOCs include eye, nose, and throat irritation; headaches, loss of coordination, nausea; damage to liver, kidney, and central nervous system. Some organics can cause cancer in animals; some are suspected or known to cause cancer in humans. Key signs or symptoms associated with exposure to VOCs include conjunctival irritation, nose and throat discomfort, headache, allergic skin reaction, shortness of breath, declines in serum cholinesterase levels, nausea, vomiting, nosebleed, fatigue and dizziness.
So you could say that these plants are self-regulating air purifiers which also produce oxygen and remove carbon from the air.
As well as adding to our safety, plants add greatly to our comfort. We feel good when we’re around healthy plants because they’re a key part of our natural environment,. To top it off, plants are beautiful, modular and incredibly good value.
So select from those listed below, and google how to care for them, it’s simple. Just be aware that many indoor plants are chosen because they are understorey plants. This means in a forest they shelter under other taller plants, and so often do not cope well with any direct sunlight on them.
These Indoor Plants have been proven to Reduce Air Pollution
Common name Latin name
Parlour Palm Chamaedorea elegans
Dracaena Dracaena marginata and D. “Janet Craig’
Kentia palm Howea forsteriana),
Peace Lilly Spathiphyllum ‘Petite’, Spathiphyllum. ‘Sensation’),
Philodendron ‘Congo’ Philodendron ‘Congo’
Pothos
Umbrella Tree Schefflera ‘Amate’
Snake Plant /Mother-in-law’s Tongue Sansevieria trifasciata
Zanzibar Zamioculcas zamiifilia
Sources: Recent Research carried out by the National Interior Plantscape Association and Professor Margaret Burchett at the University of Technology Sydney.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s660596.htm http://www.nipa.asn.au/
Overnight energy audit saves $50,000
We assume so much in life, both personally and at work. Our assumptions and reality aren’t always the same. An occasional “reality check” can be very valuable. I wonder what expensive assumptions our organisations might harbour?
One of our clients, a medium size organisation somewhere in Australia, discovered in a very easy way that they were unnecessarily using $50,000 extra electricity each year.
It only took an overnight audit to discover this fantastic wastage. It was done by their staff as participants in our Greenhouse Gossip program
Most staff would shut down their computers when leaving work. No one was there to see that many of the computers were turning themselves back on around 8pm! Really, who would expect that?
After their audit, the staff came back the next day, to speak to the staff members whose computers were on. They discussed this and discovered the problem. By speaking to staff in other buildings in their organisation, and the ICT people, they discovered it was across the organisation.
The problem is now solved and they have an additional $50,000 to use each year from that one building (plus other savings identified and implemented in the program).
This is the kind of benefit that a structured, inquiring program can deliver.