Multinationals Fight Climate Change

[kalantai]

Multinationals Fight Climate Change
Eleven companies are teaming up to see how they can work with thousands of their suppliers to curb greenhouse gas emissions, an environmental consultancy said on Sunday.The companies in the program, called the Supply Chain Leadership Collaboration, include giants in their sectors like Cadbury Schweppes, Dell, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble and Tesco.
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[Big_Becka_itloggedme]

Interesting, but it’s too little too late.

Nestle has been boycotted by the NUS for years (not just for environmental reasons, but social ones, such as Nestle’s activities in Africa), and people are starting to boycott Tesco (in favour of locally produced, sustainable goods - especially since Tesco were banking their profits offshore to avoid tax some years ago). I suspect this is just a publicity stunt, to try and win back some customers.

Multinationals such as these are always going to be environmenally un-friendly to a point. They rely on long supply chains. They reduced their use of recyclable products in favour of plastics in the 70s. They overpackage their goods. Tesco manufacture cheap clothes in 3rd world sweatshops and then fly them halfway round the world. They have enormous supermarkets that need to be heated and lit 24 hours, and then padlock the rubbish skips so that poor people can’t take the huge amounts of food they throw away.

All hail Wal-Mart for imposing a 20% reduction in its own carbon emissions. But the point is that supermarkets are over. We cannot have such long supply lines between us and our food. Not any more. The very model of the supermarket is unsustainable, what with the packaging, food miles and destruction of British farming. Small, independent suppliers, processors and retailers or community-owned shops selling locally produced food provide a social glue and reduce carbon emissions. The same is true of food co-ops such as Manchester’s bulk-distribution scheme serving former “food deserts”.

All hail BP and Shell for having got beyond petroleum to become non-profit eco-networks supplying green energy. But fail to cheer the Fortune 500 corporations that will save us all and ecologists are denounced as anti-business. Many career environmentalists fear that an anti-capitalist position is what’s alienating the mainstream from their irresistible arguments. But is it not more likely that people are stunned into inaction by the bizarre discrepancy between how extreme the crisis described and how insipid the solutions proposed? Go on a march to the House of Commons. Write a letter to your MP. And what system does your MP hold with? Name one that isn’t pro-capitalist. Oh, all right then, smartarse. But name five.

“It’s capitalism or a habitable planet - you can’t have both” by Rob Newman. Full article here: guardian.co.uk/environment/2 … gy.comment

[tresz08]

sounds interesting and quite difficult too…i hope that this can really help for the benefits of all…and im still hoping for it is not too late for everyone of us…

[adamglen]

Thanks for the information. such a informatiove post. keep it up.