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10 Green Christmas Gift Ideas They’ll Love

Sally Hill | 07.12.10

As you get ready for one of the happiest and most relaxing times of the year, we hope you'll spend a little time Christmas shopping, but as much as possible among family and friends.

This list provides some gift ideas which are easy to get hold of and won't cost the earth. There's no compromise on quality with these earth-friendly (and people-friendly) treasures.

We figure, if you must celebrate with presents, they may as well be ecological and respectful to the planet - and they're all the more lovely for it.

Merry Christmas!

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Disappointing Budget for Green Growth

Anna Guyer | 22.03.12

We couldn't have been more disappointed with the Budget today - you might have predicted that there would be nothing with any vision or recognition of the role that green investment could have in driving the UK economy - but to see it focus on tax breaks for the oil sector and investment in gas, it was depressing at best.   The claim of the 'greenest government ever' has simply become a long-standing joke.

Unbelievably - Greg Barker - was interviewed on Business Green hailing the Budget’s 'crystal clear commitment' to green economy. The Climate Minister said: "This is the Budget where the green economy joined the economic mainstream."

I sometimes wonder what planet he lives on?   Certainly not a planet that he respects or believes needs to be protected.   Renewables are not in the interests of the government or large energy companies - and therefore seem constantly undermined by those who don't want to see them succeed. 

Thank goodness for Caroline Lucas.   If I could vote for her as Prime Minister I would.   She is the one politician that we have left who speaks out on the issues with knowledge and clarity and regularly holds the government to account.

Caroline Lucas, leader of the Green Party and MP for Brighton Pavilion, said the Budget represented the "nail in the coffin for this government's ‘greenest ever' pledge".

"The determination to plough ahead with growth-at-any-cost planning reforms and aviation expansion, throw money at North Sea oil and gas, and ignore the potential of green energy shows that this administration's environmental policy is blue, not green," she said.

"The Chancellor's stubborn refusal to accept that investment in clean renewable energy and energy efficiency can simultaneously tackle the environmental crisis, stabilise the UK economy and create jobs is depriving this country of a more prosperous future."

Where do we go from here?   Feel utterly depressed for a day or two.  Then re-focus, take a deep breath, surround ourselves with people who are doing great things - and put our energy and focus into helping and supporting those that are doing great things as people, communities and businesses, making progress and creating change, in spite of the government rather than with its support.

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green, green party, oil, george osborne, budget, budget 2012, greg barker, gas, caroline lucas

The Budget: The green movement’s big opportunity?

Greta Jonyniate | 23.03.12

So after two days, the outrage is beginning to abate, the pundits have run out of steam, and George Osborne’s budget is beginning to sink in as hard, cold fiscal fact. Just when we thought we knew what was coming (50p tax rate to be cut, mansion tax introduced), Osborne pulled out the cuts to pensioner’s tax subsidies. #Grannytax is still trending, and cartoonists have had an excuse to draw wolves and bonnets, with “Grandma, what big…” puns galore. But what about the environment?

When it comes to the Budget, at least the green movement can be said to be all in it together. John Sauven, exectuive director of Greenpeace, said Budget 2012 was “a bad day for the environment.” Paul Barwell, chief executive of the Solar Trade Association, thought the budget’s confirmation that solar wouldn’t receive a key energy efficiency tax break was “solar…singled out for rough treatment.” But this was Barwell being near sighted; green policies as a whole received a rough deal. Or to put it less elegantly, in the words of John Cridland, director general of the CBI - “this budget sticks two fingers up at David Cameron’s promise to build a clean future.”

Rough treatment, sticking two fingers up, mugging pensioners…no wonder the Daily Mail portrayed Osborne as a hoodie wearing thug. But is it Osborne who is being singled out for rough treatment? Only last week, James Murray, editor of BuisnessGreen, argued that Osborne is set to become the greenest chancellor in history. He is giving us the Green Investment Bank, carbon floor price and the Green - albeit dubious - Deal. Post-Budget, is Murray regretting his pre-Budget statements or hoping that he will be vindicated? And how could the green movement learn to follow Cameron’s pre-election lead and ‘hug a hoodie’ like Osborne?

Perhaps Osborne is right to promote the business in ‘sustainable business.’ Last month, research in the USA and Europe has found that there could be a correlation between unemployment and the likelihood of belief in global warming.  If you spend a period of time unemployed, it seems you are prone to treat your belief in the issue as a luxury you can no longer afford. Therefore, to increase support for key sustainable polices, you need a population that believes in the urgent need for sustainable infrastructure, and to have such a population, you need a population that is enjoying a low rate of unemployment.

Is Osborne going the right way to increase employment? So far, the answer is a resounding no. His plan to slash corporate tax and personal income tax for the richest can not guarantee more jobs. Even if oil and gas, big Budget winners, get more people working, there would be a perverse logic to employ people in a fossil-fuel industry so they will be more likely to believe in climate change.

Tthe Chancellor needs to be sold on the idea of green jobs. Sustainablity and business have to work together. If Osborne wants jobs, the green movement needs to show that it can deliver. Looking to the USA, we can see this is a tough argument to make. What is a green job? Why should people want a green job? How benefical are they? Sadly, Osborne has showed he has no interest in answering these questions. So it’s up to sustainable business leaders to inform him and - more importantly - voters. We need more articles in right wing, climate sceptic papers to shift the argument to show that green jobs are the way forward for the UK. This is sustainable businesses big task. But it is also sustainable businesses big opportunity.
 

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green, global warming, osborne, grannytax, budget, unemployment, budget 2012

What can you learn from the Guardian Open Weekend?

Richard Lemmer | 26.03.12

photo: Felix Clay

What was learnt from the Guardian Open Weekend:

1) That sandal wearing and lentil eating has been greatly over exaggerated.

2) Don’t be afraid to let other people do the hard work. Most of the weekend’s talks allowed for at least a third of their allotted time to be spent on questions from the audience. This led to interesting results. Decca Aitkenhead has admitted that using reader's questions to interview artist Grayson Perry proved to be more effective than her own ideas: “At the very beginning Perry had expressly asked not to be questioned about future projects – and yet (one) reader's hypothetical scenario got him talking about it, and produced the one news story of the session. Truthfully, I would never have asked that question. It is a sobering and rather confronting thought.”

3) Learn to love new technology. The humble written essay alone can’t compete with the hyperlinked, video-streaming web 2.0. Through the magic of the Twitter, we found out that @finbarjameson would have liked more entertainment between talks, and @RhiannonWilkins wanted more sessions with the Guardian journalists talking about their jobs. We also pitched in with our opinion to deputy editor @Iankatz1000, who said our wish for more panel debates at next year’s event will be noted. Time will tell if he was just being trying to embrace the Open ethos.

4) Even if you don’t get the results you want, sometimes the process can be fun and feel worthwhile. Greenhouse PR had its fair share of fun asking key decision makers direct questions. Zac Goldsmith told us he thought that the green movement needed to be united on some issues, such as ocean pollution, but there could be wide disagreement about other issues, such as the use of incinerators. In terms of answering our question (How can the green movement stop itself from fragmenting into an incoherent set of local organisations - is this just mixed messages rebranded as organic debate?), Goldsmith’s answer was as deep as a foot bath. But it left us feeling like we had engaged with the issue.

5) Every organisation should be doing something like this. The Guardian made it look relatively easy - a lot of hard work would have gone into a largely mishap free festival - but why can’t the same idea be applied more widely? Aside from the fact it produced useful content and ticket sales will have paid editor Alan Rusbridger’s salary for the year, the festival was fantastic PR for the Guardian as a brand. And as much as any loyal Guardian reader would hate to admit they are in love with a brand (no brands! down with capitalism!), the Guardian has a design aesthetic, an ethos, and a marketing strategy - ie. a brand. So why can’t other brands follow suit? The technology is available to allow any organisation to engage its users so that they are involved in the process. An open day, a Google+ hangout event, a mass-Skype chat - an event that blurs the distinction being user and producer is a simple way of crystallising this abstract idea of Open-ness into a genuine feeling of goodwill and positive activity.

In a world where anyone can be a few clicks away from the deputy editor of a website with over two million unique users per day, what organisation wants to be seen as Closed?

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Future Money

Richard Lemmer | 25.04.12

“Financial markets are like the mirrors of mankind, revealing every hour of every working day the way we value ourselves and the resources of the world around us.”  So said financial expert Niall Ferguson at the end of his book The Ascent of Money. Today, it is safe to bet that George Osborne does not like what he sees in the mirror. As the UK slips into a double dip recession, it seems Osborne’s Age of Austerity to balance the Boom Years of Brown has yet to be proven as an valuable economic model.   Are there any valuable ideas Osborne would be well advised to borrow?

James Robertson, founder of the Other Economic Summit and the New Economic Foundation, thinks there are plenty.  His new book, Future Money, details his ideas for a financial system that 1) allows for more egalitarian distribution, and 2) doesn’t squander the planet’s finite resources. In short, Robertson is proposing a financial system that better reflects the value we place on ourselves, on our global society and on our environment.

Robertson argues in favour of three big ideas. On a local stage, alternative currencies similar to the scrip of 1930s Austria or the modern day bitcoin should be promoted. These special currencies have special properties (their value deflates over time, leading to faster money circulation) that would help local economies, which suffer at the hands of macro-economic policies fostered by big banks.

On the national stage, banks can avoid baroque regulation but will face one stiff policy: a governmental and centralised bank will control how much monetary value can be created and circulated within the financial system. In essense, this means that your credit balance shown by an ATM will be tied to a tangible figure set by a governing body, rather than a free-floating value that is being traded from Australia to Zambia. This will also allow the government to reign in a raging bull market (by stemming the creation of credit) and encourage investment during a cautious bear market.

Finally, on the international stage, the international community should create a parallel currency which allows for the taxation of the use of the global commons. In plain English, it means a UN-like body could tax a company for ruining something that is akin to a global village common - like fish stocks or the atmosphere.

Robertson’s book is a mixture of old and new ideas that are all worthwhile to anyone in involved in the green movement. E.F. Shumacher idea of hierarchy and small is beautiful certainly play a part. He touches on ethics and financial markets, but largely he takes it as given that the reader will agree egalitarianism and environmental protection are good values to foster. If you are an economics whizz who believes a page without a complex equation or an angry looking graph is a tragedy, then you will probably feel under-whelmed. But there is plenty of opportunity for a keen reader to develop these ideas further - to do the maths to prove how well it will work.

The book shows that if our financial markets are the mirrors of mankind, there is plenty of room for them to be moved, repositioned, and polished. Green thinking has an important part to play in this new movement.

Whether it is too late for George Osborne to see a better side of himself, has yet to be seen.  However, it is doubtful that his thinking will ever be Green.

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The Greenest Or Most Arrogant Government Ever?

Richard Lemmer | 30.04.12

Last week saw David Cameron make a few “remarks” on the environment at the CEM3 (Clean Energy Ministerial conference). For a man who clearly understands the power of PR, his choice of words were somewhat poor; the green movement was waiting for a key note speech, not a mode of address you would associate with cocktail party chit-chat. Somehow, Cameron thought he could explain that his government is the greenest in the entirety of British history - in less than ten minutes.

By making the claim, Cameron has set himself a huge task. Understanding the power of the green movement and the pressing need to deal with climate change, the prime minister understood he could save several birds with one bird feeder: detoxifying the nasty party by hugging a husky and urging voters to Go Green, Vote Blue. See below for Channel Four's entertaining Tom Clark showing us what huskies are really meant for. But for sheer sticking power, Cameron’s rhetoric and spin on green issues has been good, with his choice of words and images being reiterated by the media over and over. Unfortunately for him, his words seem to haunt him like ghosts with no substance, as Cameron struggles to live up to the expectation he has created. Last year, a Friends of the Earth report marked the progress of Cameron’s green policies: most of them were rated as moribund or showing limited progress. Also, if Cameron wants his green rhetoric to be taken seriously, he needs to stop jumping on the debt and deficit band wagon every time he mentions renewable energy. We have enough austerity vs green thinking rhetoric from George Osborne. As the ever discerning Damian Carrington has pointed out, the green economy now employs more people than teaching. There's no need for Cameron to hedge his green ambitions with worries about the deficit; the green economy is working.

But Cameron’s remarks regarding the environment expose a potentially greater PR misstep. A recent Guardian comment piece suggested that the prime minister’s problem is that he is creating the image of himself as an "arrogant posh boy." Cameron’s green government claim fits this image perfectly: he’s part of, like, the totally greenest government ever, yah?  And, of course, he sees it as "a very simple ambition." Forget the previous government making commitments to uphold Kyoto Protocol targets - Cameron's government is going to best that, and make it look simple. Cameron’s belief in his statement and the public‘s disbelief in the very same statement compound the public‘s feeling that the prime minister is out of touch.

People want a strong and confident leader. No one likes a naive and arrogant young man.

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