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Branding an elephant called global warming

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A famous parable demonstrates how truth is relative: A wise man guides four blind people to describe an object. They are led to an Asian elephant. Groping about, they try to appreciate and explain the new phenomenon. One grasps the trunk and concludes it is a snake. Another explores one of the elephant’s legs and describes it as a tree. A third finds the elephant’s tail and announces that it is a rope. The fourth blind man, after discovering the elephant’s side, concludes it’s a wall.

The tale reminds me of the current confusion surrounding global warming. According to eminent people like Sir Nicolas Stern, if CEOs in the UK do nothing about climate change, it will cost the equivalent of at least 5 percent of Global GDP each year, now and forever.
According to Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), there are already almost as many environmentally displaced people on the planet as traditional refugees. The figure for ‘climate refugees’ could be as high as 50 million by 2010.
Yet some conspiracy theorists suggest the current fixation with energy and pollution is in fact more to do with the tip of the propaganda iceberg related to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and oil prices, rather than the fate of Antarctica. Others wonder if the whole issue has only gained powerful support, as it helps breath new life into general elections for parties such as the US Republicans or in the UK, David Cameron’s Conservatives.
Supporting their case, cynics point to Professor Richard Toi, cited 63 times in the 670 page Stern report, who said, “If a student of mine were to hand in this report as a Masters thesis, perhaps if I was in a good mood I would give him a ‘D’ for diligence; but more likely I would give him an ‘F’ for fail.”

The winds of change
Hurricane Katrina brought the potential effects of global warming to the doorstep of the American public. In March 2006, a TNS/ABC poll showed 49 percent of Americans deemed global warming extremely important to them personally. A further three in 10 said it was somewhat important. (In 1998 only 31 percent of people thought global warming was extremely important). In April 2007, it was reported that the world’s largest freshwater lake by surface area, Lake Superior, could completely lose its essential ice cover by 2040. Just before Easter 2007, global rises in temperatures and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lead to a US Supreme Court ruling that global warming is ‘real’.
In the UK, David Cameron wants CEOs, and everyone else for that matter, to either stop flying or only fly once in a blue moon (or should that be red hot sun?) Yet many question the sincerity of a man who takes a private plane from Oxford to Herefordshire – a distance of less than 100 miles – rather than catch the train.
Prime Minister in waiting – Gordon Brown – wants everyone to change lightbulbs and switch off the television sets to do something more interesting instead – presumably in the dark.
The Climate Change Bill aims to reduce emissions by up to 32 percent by 2020 and 60 per cent by 2050. While Britain will become the first country in the world to set legally binding targets for cutting its carbon dioxide emissions, it will continue to trade with the doyens of industrial strength toxic global warming: India and China.
Offering factories tradable allowances, the European Union’s Emission Trading Scheme caps the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by industry. Yet, in the past, too many allowances have been dished out and devalued – so they no longer give countries powerful inducements to invest in alternative green-friendly technologies.
How do you tackle an elephant?
Recognising that something has to be done, CEOs are asking brand communication and marketing departments to lend their expertise in tackling the climate change ‘elephant’ and at the same time, reinvent the PR merits of corporate social responsibility. For their parts, global marketing departments are looking at ways to make sustainability sexy.
For example, noting the unfriendly and confusing tone of the expression ‘global warming’ Viral Marketing guru, Seth Godin invited marketers throughout the world to come up with a more user-friendly term. Answers ranged from ‘global crisis’ to ‘fever climating’.
In the US, Ben and Jerry’s, owned by Uniliver, launched a Climate Change College. Energy-bar producer, Clif Bar & Co’s instigated an employee incentive programme called The Cool Commute, offering $5,000 to employees who buy a hybrid-fuel cars.
Orders for Toyota Motor Corp’s Prius hybrid cars are booming. Don Esmond, Toyota’s senior vice president for US sales, said the company plans to boost Prius sales to 175,000 this year, from 106,971 in 2006. In the UK, the recent widening of the congestion charge area in London will also increase demand.
It’s hip to be on the edge of oblivion
Italian based fashion brand, Diesel has taken the concept of global warming to new extremes. Their ‘Global Warming Ready’ print advertisements campaign feature celebrated international tourist spots devastated by global warming. The skies of Venice’s St Mark’s Square is filled with tropical birds rather than pigeons. A flooded London is only accessible by speedboat. New York City is waterlogged. South Dakota’s Mount Rushmore is on a beach and China’s Great Wall is buried in desert sands. All the ads show models wearing Diesel clothes and the headline: ‘Global Warming Ready’. Trendy Diesel aficionados are encouraged to visit green-friendly websites like, www.stopglobalwarming.org.

Every cloud has a cO2 lining
Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Trains are aiming to tap into the green consciousness the business traveller. He has also teamed with Al Gore, former American Vice President (now an eco-global movie celebrity) to announce a $25m initiative to clean up the skies. A series of concerts “bigger than Live Aid” announced for this July, will put the subject of climate change before a global audience of two billion. The concerts will encourage individuals to take personal pledges to reduce emissions, for instance, by using energy efficient equipment or flying less.
In his classic book, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell’s suggests that to instigate sustainable change you must reach key movers within a market; offering them a genuine sense of individual autonomy, mutually beneficial for themselves, their peers and environment. A bullying brand or authority coercing a market ‘top down’ by sheer brute force just won’t work.
The current lack of consistent clarity and authority from a universally credible source of information about global warming is confusing. Legitimacy gaps cause complacency. People realise something ought to be done, but fall into the trap of feeling comfortable simply doing nothing; hoping that either corporations and governments will sort the problem or gambling that it may go away through natural causes.
Having been thrown the gauntlet, it’s time for CEOs to harness the skills of their communication, marketing departments to support production processes in turning the threat of global warming into profi table outcomes for business, people and the planet.
www.brandforensics.co.uk

Eight brand forensics steps to market the elephant
1 Position global warming as something affecting consumers directly and immediately.
2 Encourage a multilateral approach to individual change.
3 Design a tangible icon that connects with people rather than corporate
sensibilities.
4 Reinforce changed habits with catchy, easy to remember phrases.
5 Offer people self control over instigating a change by participating in a collaborative process.
6 Let people recognise non-cynical efforts made by trusted brands and so encourage them feel that they too can contribute towards a greater good.
7 Address, in a non-patronising way, the genuine concerns of individuals such as the young and middle aged.
8 Help people frame climate change messages in perspective.

GM pharming

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Genetically modified crops have already come up against the brick wall of public opinion in Britain. The original movement to produce food crops genetically modified to be immune or resistant to herbicides or pests, or both, resulted in a huge media and public backlash.

For whatever reasons, be they superstitious or scientific, there is little tolerance from the UK public for manipulating the genetic make-up of natural products for the convenience or efficiency of farming.
But GM scientists have a new agenda; they are no longer concerned about improving conditions for traditional farming, they have moved on to the new pastures of pharming. Pharming is the process of growing and harvesting plants that have been genetically engineered with foreign DNA to make them produce medicine – or proteins which can be purified to produce medicine – at a fraction of the price of conventional manufacture. Scientists are currently growing plants with genetic instructions to make drugs for the treatment of diseases such as HIV, rabies and Hepatitis B, as well as crucial dietary supplements.

Scientists have long looked for ways to bring down the high costs of the extant procedures for drug production used by the world’s pharmaceutical industry. Big pharma companies’ bottom lines dictate that drug production tends to favour those parts of the world and sections of society which can turn medicines into profits. Pharming could turn that situation on its head.

There is still, of course uneasiness about the science. The Daily Mail, that self-appointed custodian of British public decency warns that there are “serious ethical concerns about such a fundamental interference with the building blocks of life.” But the argument from repulsion is much harder to make when the end product could mean saving the lives of millions in the developing world. Even anti-GM protestors, who destroyed a crop of GM corn plants in France recently, embarrassedly denied involvement when outraged patient groups revealed that the crops were being used to develop a protein used in the treatment of cystic fibrosis.
It should be remembered that the original GM drive promised to feed the world’s poor. If we allowed queasiness to countermand that drive, will the world’s sick fare any better?
The scientists involved are certainly passionate that their research may provide a unique solution to the world’s most serious medical problems. Professor Julian Ma, who heads a project at the Centre for Infection at St George’s Hospital in South London, to pharm potent drugs against HIV insists the benefits of pharming could give hope to millions: “The advantages they offer simply cannot be equalled by any other system. They provide the most promising opportunity open to us to supply low-cost drugs and vaccines to the developing world.”
Ma’s own project is to produce a drug called Cyanorvirin-N, which helps stop the HIV virus entering human cells. The St George’s team intend to develop the drug into a cream which can be applied by women in countries where men are unwilling to use condoms. He says: “If you’re a woman in sub-Saharan Africa, you’re not going to pay even a dollar or two a week for this. It has to be pennies, and that means it has to be produced in plants.” Ma estimates that 5 tonnes of the drug would be needed to provide two doses a week to 10 million – an amount way beyond feasibility for the production scale and economics of conventional drug manufacture.
His frustration with concerns such as those voiced in the Daily Mail is informed by an understanding of the part GM already plays in the health of millions of Britons. Growth hormones and insulin, routinely taken by diabetes sufferers in Britain, are made by adding the relevant human genes to bacteria used to produce human proteins – a fundamental interference with the building blocks of life that has been widely accepted since the 1980s. Ma explains: “From a scientific point of view there really isn’t anything special about plants with drugs in them. We can’t divorce the science from public attitudes, but life is all about risk assessment and it just isn’t feasible to make enough of these medicines in any other way.”
At the moment, Ma’s crops are grown in tobacco plants in a carefully controlled, windowless room on the roof of the hospital and in super-secure greenhouses in Kent, with a level of security Ma calls “ridiculous”.

Many feel that in order to sustain the levels of growth required for pharming to work it will be necessary to downgrade these security requirements and perhaps start growing proteins, for cheaper and quicker results, in food crops. The major benefit of pharming would be scale, but this last step may prove a major stumbling block. The possibility that GM crops pharmed to produce human proteins could escape into the food chain and contaminate entire food crops, is too large a risk for most.

It is on this particular point that even some of GM’s usual allies draw the line.
The UK’s New Scientist magazine has said that pharming food crops would be “daft” and “should never be tried in practice”. And an editorial in leading American pro-industry journal Nature certainly didn’t hold back in its searing criticism of such plans when it wrote: “It seems an industry in which the PhD is the intellectual norm is either incapable of learning a simple lesson from the past or cannot bring itself to act appropriately, despite what it has learned previously… This position is not anti GM – we should be concerned about the presence of a potentially toxic substance in food plants. After all, is this really so different from a conventional [drugs] manufacturer packaging its pills in candy wrappers?”
Ma is unperturbed, though, and suspects that the presence of human proteins (the Daily Mail’s building blocks of life) have led to double standards. He points to the fact that some British farmers grow rape seed to produce erucic acid, an additive for the plastics industry. “That is much more toxic than anything I grow.” He points to lysozome, a saliva protein engineered into rice by US company Ventria Bioscience in Kansas: “If you want to stop that getting into the environment you need to stop people spitting in the street.”

Pharmers have a number of ways of preventing this kind of cross-contamination including growing sterile varieties, fluorescent marks to identify stray seeds, and genetic tricks to stop the foreign genes appearing in pollen. GM pharmers themselves, unlike GM farmers, want to avoid cross-contamination. But for GM opponents these safeguards will never be enough. Ma hopes that the answer to changing attitudes will simply be to show the public what is possible: “The most important thing is to get that first product out there, then people will realise what we can do” he says.

Cell division

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Embryonic stem cell research has divided the world. For some, it represents the future of medical science, for others, the end of human dignity. Whatever the ethical concerns, it represents a massive commercial opportunity for biotech companies. And for countries that come down on the right side of the divide, a big boost to the economy.

The UK biotech industry is growing. Though it still lags some way behind its American competitors, it is enjoying better health today than it has ever sustained before. Last year, biotech investment in the UK and Europe rose by 20 percent to 1.4bn, reflecting a new era of stability for the industry.

Barring the mini-boom of investment some five years ago, fuelled partly by the hype surrounding the human genome project, the pioneering days of the industry saw very little investment, and when the bubble burst on the overvalued science of the HGP, the biotech start-ups were once again painfully short of money, leaving some of the industry’s most talented scientists out of jobs.

As low-tech manufacturing drifted east, the UK government focussed more and more on the ‘knowledge economy’ and the manufacture of high-tech and scientific products. Extra government spending and increased investment helped nurture biotechnology through a long and tentative recovery period. Investor confidence has now finally returned, largely in response to biotechs taking better account of commercial demands and focussing on projects with shorter lead times. But it is partly this commercial maturity – and scientific conservatism – that has left potentially vast wells of investment into controversial embryonic stem cell research untapped. The research promises to test the parameters of bio-medical ethics, and most of the newly commercialised biotechs have been unable to steel themselves to enter this dangerous and confusing moral landscape before legal, regulatory and intellectual property issues have been resolved.

Dr Cathy Prescott of Avlar BioVentures, talking at the White Rose Bioscience Forum in York last October, highlighted the difficulties faced by biotechs brave enough to take the journey alone, in the face of an almost total lack of support for cell-based product development from the pharmaceutical industries. She said: “If that crucial support is not there from the pharma industry, young companies need to think very hard about whether they realistically have the expertise to take a product to market on their own… Of the money invested, the majority of it is used to continue to support the more mature biotech companies… The most pragmatic advice I can give to young companies is to show venture capitalists that they have anticipated, understood and determined a route forward to resolve key hurdles facing them. This will underpin the success of UK biotech companies whose technology expertise lies in stem cell therapeutics.”

Divide and conquer
There’s little doubt that unrestricted stem cell research would be the catalyst for a full-scale medical revolution – something any biotech would want to be involved in. The cells of a human embryo are essentially units of human potential. After conception, the first two cells grow and divide to create four cells, which grow and divide again. Before long they multiply into a ball of many cells, eventually transforming into all of the more than 200 kinds of cell that constitute a human body. Each cell has the power to divide and conquer a problem that has long been the holy grail of biology; creating complex organisms from simple building blocks. Scientists have long dreamed of taking those cells from a new human embryo and coaxing them to perform, in the laboratory, the miraculous feat they perform in the wombs of hundreds of women every day around the world. The cells could then be used to repair damaged tissues or replace diseased organs with living, purpose-grown replacements, rather than the crude mechanical devices currently at the disposal of the medical industry. That dream could now be a reality.

The great debate
In November 1998, James Thomson, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, announced that he had succeeded in removing cells from the unused embryos routinely stored in fertility clinics across the country, and using them to establish the world’s first human embryonic stem cell line.

The potential impact of his findings could hardly be exaggerated. It was a discovery that in any other field would have resulted in a major federal research project. Instead, it sparked a violent dispute about human life and human progress that spread around the world. The big decisions over stem cell research have since been wrestled from the hands of scientists. The progress made is no longer to be decided by dithering biotech companies or their reluctant investors. The decision belongs to the policymakers and governments of the world. It is for them to draw the line, to mark the limits of progress and of moral behaviour, and many have already made their decisions.

Thomson’s announcement dragged biotechnology into a maelstrom of religious and political arguments. Religious leaders, congressmen, and finally the Oval Office wanted to know where the needed embryos would come from and how many would be consumed by the demand of the world’s sick. Many in the US insisted that embryos are just as fully members of society as adult humans, and that their vulnerability demands they be protected more than most. Some compared the harvesting of embryonic cells to cannibalism and hyperbolic phrases like ’embryo farms’ and ‘cloning mills’ became commonplace. The same reaction was repeated in many other countries, as religious and moral anger raged across the globe.

The attitudes of those opposed to the research were summed up by a Greenpeace protest against human embryo patents outside the Reichstag in Germany. Protesters carrying placards with the uncompromising slogan ‘Stoppt Patente Auf leben’ marched around hundreds of frozen blocks of ice, each one with a plastic baby doll inside. The Greenpeace representatives were probably aware (unlike many of those who saw their protest) that the embryos being discussed were no bigger than the full point at the end of this sentence. They have no identifying features, and not even the merest hint of a nervous system. But shock tactics are from rare when discussing issues as important and emotive as this.

Some of the protestations of the so-called ‘pro-life’ movement and the wider religious right in the US rested on ground already lost. They argued that embryos should not be created ‘unnaturally’ (outside the womb) at all, and that all embryos should be allowed to fulfil the potential to grow into adult humans. But many thousands of unwanted embryos legally created in just such a way are lying in the freezers of fertility clinics around the world waiting to be destroyed. Proponents of stem cell research argue that, as long as parents agree to donate them, it would be positively unethical not to use them in the pursuit of overcoming disease, rather than destroy them. The debate goes on.

Profit from progress
Not all stem cell research is surrounded by such controversy. It is possible to take stem cells from adults. But although early research indicates these are useful for some diseases, they cannot produce the range of cell types possible with embryonic cells. The umbilical cords and placental blood of newborn babies are also rich in stem cells, and although some balk at the idea of purpose-grown tissue in any form, fearing it will lead to human cloning, these cells at least do not have possess potential to naturally develop into human beings.

Richard Branson has just launched a much-publicised Virgin-branded cold-storage operation where parents can store their newborn’s umbilical cord and placental blood for use in later life. The stem cells thereby retained could be used to grow tissue or organs much less likely to be rejected by the body than cells imported from another donor, and the project might prove to have huge medical potential. But research carried out on pigs and mice suggests these types of stem cell could not match the versatility of embryonic stem cells, which have already been used to replace injured or dead cells in these animals to cure heart disease, diabetes, spinal cord injuries and many more afflictions. Research on human embryonic stem cells could yet prove to be modern medical science’s biggest discovery.

Clearly, this area could be a potential goldmine for biotechnology, and crucially – given the massive polarity of views globally – a chance for biotechnology to find strongholds in the scientifically liberal countries willing to embrace, promote and invest in the resulting technologies. Branson’s step is a brave one. Private storage, of the type he is offering, is opposed by the EC’s European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies and is now unlawful in France and Italy. But Branson’s courtship of controversy might be just what biotechnology needs. Much of the discussion and legislation surrounding stem cell research so far has been squeamish of commercialism to say the very least. Of course Branson has tried to show that his motivation in this venture, as with the research he is privately funding into biofuels, is born of corporate conscience – half of the donated blood will be stored in a national bank for research purposes – but the company will be run for profit. And biotechs can’t afford to be afraid of turning profit from progress.

Pharmaceutical industry executives at the World Economic Forum in Davos at the beginning of this year suggested Branson could be in a position to set up a fully-fledged biotech company if he invested in the medicines associated with stem cells.

Biotech’s new stronghold
The likely locations of biotechnology’s new strongholds are already emerging as countries come down on one side or the other of the great cell division. Germany has already prohibited some types of stem cell research, France and Italy have outlawed private stem cell storage, and the US has imposed severe limits on government funding. But the UK, along with China, Korea and others, has offered funding and bio-ethical guidance to research projects in a bid to establish itself as an epicentre for the potentially huge stem cell industry.

Boundaries, of course, have been drawn, but the UK is keen to achieve the best results possible within the parameters of public approval. To that end, Science and Innovation Minister Malcolm Wicks has announced that the UK’s two major public funders of stem cell research, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and the Medical Research Council (MRC), will run a national public discussion on the issue funded by the Sciencewise unit of the DTI. The dialogue programme will aim to bring scientists and the public together to identify public expectations, aspirations and concerns about stem cell research, and will be paid for by a £300,000 government grant. When the announcement was made at a meeting of leading experts in the field in London recently MRC Chief Executive, Colin Blakemore, made it clear that the dialogue was as much about moving forward as gauging opinion. He said: “Discussion will help to make scientists understand the potential of their work and policymakers aware of the public’s views. In turn, this might lead to laboratory discoveries being applied more quickly in the clinic.”

As the world’s governments mark their moral cards, scientists around the globe are racing to see which techniques will produce treatments soonest. Many will migrate to the countries where research is most easily and freely carried out, in turn boosting the intellectual resources of those countries, and the level of investment they enjoy. If the UK continues to do all it can to count itself among them, its biotech industry is set to become one of the strongest in the world.

Virgin stem cell storage
Richard Branson has announced the launch of a Virgin-branded cold-storage operation where parents can store their newborn’s umbilical cord and placental blood for use in later life. The storage facility, which opened in February, will charge parents £1,500 to put their child’s cord blood into storage. The controversial private cord storage industry is growing quickly, with more than 11,000 families in the UK currently paying an average £100 per month to use the facilities, despite the odds of an individual using their personal cord blood before the age of 20 being estimated by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) at 1/2700. The RCOG maintains it “remains unconvinced of the benefit of personal commercial banking for low-risk families.”

Green giants

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One of the main drivers behind companies’ decisions to go ‘green’ is to reduce the environmental impact of business operations by cutting down their greenhouse gas emissions. This is the case even if a company’s facilities are not currently capped under the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. Other benefits include diversifying energy supplies and hedging from fluctuating fossil fuel prices, as well as strengthening a company’s stakeholder relationships and differentiating its brand.

Each of these benefits is a ‘business case’ for using renewable energy, in other words, each constitutes a business rationale for management to switch at least some of the corporation’s energy supply to renewable sources. Each business case directly or indirectly links renewable energy use to better margins and operating performance. As a result, opportunities exist for firms to conduct business in an economically and environmentally sustainable manner.
Companies are pursuing innovative project financing and implementation strategies to get these projects off the ground. The Green Power Market Development Group-Europe, a unique partnership of leading European companies, is playing a role in advancing corporate markets for renewable energy in Europe.

Lower corporate energy costs
A common misperception is that renewable energy is always more expensive than energy from conventional sources. Many companies, however, are finding that under the right conditions this is not necessarily the case. In fact, some firms are switching to renewable resources in order to reduce their energy costs.
Several types of on-site renewable energy projects can cut costs. Geothermal heat pumps, for example, can reduce heating and cooling expenses at corporate facilities. For Johnson & Johnson’s DePuy business unit in France, a geothermal heat pump is saving the facility nearly €9,000 a year.
On-site wind power projects can also be cost competitive if the wind resource and national renewable energy incentives are advantageous. In the United Kingdom, for example, Ford, Michelin, and Pirelli have all installed three to four megawatt on-site wind parks at their sites, providing attractively priced power. In Belgium, Nike hosts a nine megawatt on-site wind park at its Customers Service Center in Laakdal and receives cost-competitive green power in return.
Biomass is another renewable energy resource that can be cost effective, particularly if the biomass residues are a by-product of a higher-value manufacturing process (eg, wood mill or food processing wastes), if the residues would otherwise have incurred a ‘tipping’ fee when dumped in a landfill, or if they already are being collected in close proximity to the location where they could be used as fuel (thereby reducing transportation costs). Johnson & Johnson switched its distribution center in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, to a biomass-fired boiler which uses wood chips from a nearby forest managed sustainably by the local authorities. The project provides cost-effective thermal energy for the site, but also contributes to Johnson & Johnson’s global goal of achieving a seven percent absolute reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from facilities worldwide by 2010, compared to that of 1990.
Reduce corporate emissions
As with the Johnson & Johnson example above, switching from fossil fuels to renewable resources can help a company lower its ‘direct’ or ‘indirect’ greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Direct GHG emissions are those from sources that are owned or controlled by the company such as emissions from the on-site generation of electricity, heat, or steam. For example, a DuPont manufacturing plant in Uentrop, Germany, replaced natural gas boilers with a biomass cogeneration system and thereby decreased its direct emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2). By co-firing biomass with coal at one of its smelters in the United Kingdom, aluminum manufacturer Alcan reduced the site’s CO2 emissions relative to burning 100 percent coal at the facility. Cement manufacturer Holcim reduces CO2 emissions at several of its kilns when it combusts biomass instead of fossil-based fuels.
Indirect GHG emissions are those that are a consequence of the company’s activities, but that occur from sources owned or controlled by another entity. They include emissions associated with the generation of purchased electricity, heat, or steam. For example, packaging material manufacturer Tetra Pak reduced its indirect GHG emissions by switching from fossil-fired electricity to green power supplied by its retail electricity providers in the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. These green power purchases are helping Tetra Pak meet its goal of reducing its global greenhouse gas emissions ten percent below 2005 levels by 2010. Johnson & Johnson, IKEA, Interface, and others have likewise reduced their indirect GHG emissions by purchasing green power instead of conventional power from their utilities in Europe.
Greenhouse gas emissions reductions, however, are often not ends in themselves. Rather, the goal is to improve the corporation’s operating margins. When regulated, emissions effectively become monetised; emitters incur costs in the form of emissions allowance or credit costs, pollution taxes, emissions control equipment expenses, or other mechanisms, depending on the country. Renewable energy can lower these emissions-related operating costs by reducing emissions, a financial impact that is readily quantifiable.
Strengthen a company’s brand
Some companies seek to differentiate their brands from those of competitors by being recognised as ‘green’ or as environmentally responsible corporate citizens. Using renewable energy is one such way to enhance a corporate or brand image. Many companies have successfully pursued this strategy. Although initially renewable energy was used more by business-to-consumer industries, a slew of business-to-business entities are now turning to green power as well. Wal-Mart, for instance, is starting to leverage its considerable clout to encourage its suppliers to improve their own efficiency and environmental performance.
Furthermore, on-site renewable energy generation systems can enhance a company’s relations with its stakeholders, from neighbors in the local community, to employees and customers. Switching to renewable energy is one element of a successful CSR strategy. For instance, Johnson & Johnson’s commitment to using renewable energy at its facilities in Europe, North America, and elsewhere, substantiates corporate values that are important not only to its customers but also to current and prospective employees.
Last, but not least, renewable energy can help strengthen a company’s standing with shareholders, especially at a time when many institutional investors are becoming increasingly concerned about corporate financial and regulatory exposure to existing and future climate change policies. Many financial institutions, such as Deutsche Bank, now examine a company’s exposure to climate change policies and impacts when evaluating loans. Likewise, several pension funds, investment banks, and other firms have banded together to form the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC) to use their collective power of over 700 billion euro in assets to influence the behaviour of companies in which they have invested.
Switching to renewable energy is one way that a company can signal to these and other institutional investors that it is managing its greenhouse gas emissions and, therefore, its climate-related risk. Furthermore, some investors interpret proactive environmental performance as an indication that corporate management has a forward-looking strategy and runs a tight ship.
The green power market development group – Europe
The group is a unique partnership dedicated to building commercial and industrial markets for renewable energy in Europe. Group partners include British Telecom, Dow, DuPont, General Motors, Holcim, IBM, IKEA, Interface, Johnson & Johnson, Michelin, Nike CSC, Staples, and Tetra Pak. Group members explore opportunities to install renewable energy generation systems such as solar, wind, and biomass at their corporate facilities and to purchase green electricity from their utilities. The peer-to-peer interaction helps the Group demonstrate the business case for corporate use of renewable energy, evaluate and deploy a variety of renewable energy technologies, and engage the marketplace to take green power to scale.
The Group is convened by the World Resources Institute (www.wri.org), a global non-profit environmental think tank that links analysis with engagement to protect the Earth and improve people’s lives.
In Europe, WRI is collaborating with the Climate Group www.theclimategroup.org), a solutions-focused organisation working to accelerate the reduction of greenhouse gases by assembling a leadership coalition of proactive companies and city, state and national governments.
More information about the Green Power Market Development Group and its activities can be found at www.thegreenpowergroup.org

Conspiracy theories through the ages

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Politics has had many faces and faced many different dilemmas. Since Plato’s Republic, man has wrestled in the political arena, pointed fingers, shifted blame, and concealed various daggers behind manifold cloaks. The New Economy investigates some o f the recent theories that have influenced, determined, scarred and decimated the political world

David Icke and the twelve-footed lizards
Former Coventry City goalkeeper and BBC sports quiz host David Icke shocked the world in 1991 by announcing on TV chat show Wogan that he was the son of God. In his position as the new Messiah, Icke predicted cataclysmic flooding and earthquakes over the following twelve months.
Following what was considered to be a publicity stunt of immense proportions, Icke developed a thesis of a global elite he termed “The Illuminati.” Accordingly the group is made up of twelve-footed lizards, such as the Grays, the Troglodytes, the Annunaki, and the Tall Blondes- the latter resembling stereotypical Swedish female models. The members of the different groups include George Bush, Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller. These different breeds have great control over the World Trade Organisation through the White House, influencing the legislation and movement of goods. Although this might take up quite some time, the reptiles also find time to drink blood and sacrifice children.
Many have accused Icke’s theories of being fiercely anti-semitic, assuming lizard to mean Jew- a charge that Icke strongly denies. By naming some of the different breeds that have populated the world from the far away fourth dimension, Icke has distanced himself from such claims.
The Global Elite, says Icke, control the Brotherhood and the world using “pyramid manipulation.” The system utilises entities such as banking, big business, the military, religion and organised crime as means by which to influence the masses. Criticised for reflecting Marxist theory, Icke goes further to attribute the pyramid system with mind control. Further still, events such as the Holocaust, the Oklahoma City bombing and the September 11 attacks are orchestrated by high powered lizards in order to defer attention from the ordinary course of world events.
Using high profile spin, the reptiles are then able to carry out plans within the public eye: such as turning on Osama bin Laden. Icke calls this type of political action problem-reaction-solution, although Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is attributed with the theory also known as “Hegelian Dialectic.”
Surprisingly, Icke has many followers both in the United States and Canada, from where he has been extradited on many occasions. His lectures can last up to six hours, and he often is known to have private audiences with PW Botha and Winnie Mandela.
Political leaders have distanced themselves from David Icke’s theories, although those on the extreme left have occupied themselves with the former footballer’s hypotheses as a means of condemning the far right. He is known to be an outstanding public speaker, whose choice of words arouse great emotion in those around. Then again, the same was said of Hitler.
A zog eat zog world
Having first appeared in Eric Thomson’s 1976 article Welcome to ZOG-World, the ZOG theory has been taken up mostly by those on the extreme right. It is particularly popular with neo-Nazis in Europe and America, and ultra-nationalists such as Pamyat in Russia and right wing groups in Poland and Sweden.
The term stands for Zionist Occupation Government and portrays the governments of the world as fronts for a hidden Jewish order who control certain nations from behind closed doors. A democratically voted government is therefore a puppet regime, the voice-piece of the secret rulers. By remaining secretive, the Jewish rulers are free to use the country for their own means, using the media as their main tool to control and indoctrinate. Some establishments accuse all western nations of ZOGism, whilst others point the finger only at the world’s superpowers.
ZOGs have been accused of selling off government owned organisations in Britain to private Jewish businesses, and depicting American extremist groups in a false light. Although particularly anti-Semetic, ZOG gained popularity over the twentieth century, as legitimate historians raised doubts over the existence of the Holocaust.
In the 1980s, robberies were carried out in California and Washington by a white supremacist group, The Order, who were attempting to raise funds to wage war on the United States Government, a known ZOG territory. Shortly before the arrival of the World Wide Web, an article in Newsweek reported that Aryan Nations- a group founded by members of the Ku Klux Klan- were planning to set up an electronic bulletin board offering information on where to find and how to penetrate “ZOG informers.”
Those critical of the theory are quick to blame the Thatcher years and privatisation as a means by which the popularity of the theory grew. In America, sociologists blame Hollywood and the electoral scandal that tarnished the beginning of the Bush administration. Recent bouts of terrorism have given rise to theories of a similar nature, like COG, or Creedish Occupied Government, which portrays the ruling body to be of an Amish descent.
The big red button
The conflict and tension of the Cold War period was a busy time for the conspiracy theorist. From gunpowder in Castro’s cigars to bugs in the White House, it is now difficult to tell what really went on. The worldwide paranoia that inebriated politicians on both sides might have been expected given the close proximity of forces in Berlin and the threat of nuclear war, whilst the length of time that it took for the war to play out could and should have diffused the situation a lot earlier.
The nuclear arms race and the Cuban Missile Crisis have been written into the history books, but many commentators affirm that the situation wasn’t quite as volatile as the press at the time made out. As one side tried to get the better of the other, publicity stunts were rife and embedded in the culture of the Cold War. Of course both sides had nuclear arms, but just how close were they to pushing the button? America apparently felt threatened enough to invest billions into the Star Wars project: a venture undertaken in the early 1980s to build a shield to protect the nation from Soviet nuclear attacks. The Cuban Missile Crisis is a conspiracy in itself, with rumours of secret deals and espionage style meetings widely reported.
Out of the Cold War have spiralled many different conspiracies, such as the doubts raised over the moon landings and the widespread belief that Stalin’s body was frozen, to be awoken at such a time that Russia needs a strong leader. Indeed, many believe that the Cold War is still a reality, although temperatures have reached freezing point and borders have been moved. It is possible to go to St Petersburg and see rows of nuclear submarines that are kept at low temperatures to stop reactors from exploding, but what have the West done with their warheads that are impossible to get rid of?

A new world order?One of a number of theories that refer to a secretive group that aims to rule the world with an autonomous, omnipresent government. The backbone of the New World Order theory is that an organisation of the world’s elite have made plans to draw forces together and usurp power from all other states.

The term was coined by Cecil Rhodes in the 1900s. Rhodes saw the future of the world lying in the hands of the United States and the British Empire, who would control the economy, trade, and the military from a central base. From such a position they could enforce and moderate world peace. The conglomeration would form a Federal World Government. Rhodes theory was seen as being too optimistic, and the idea was apparently dropped.
Theorists picked up on the idea years later, and still argue that a joining of superpowers is in the offing. Readings of Masonic signs and the inscription Novus Ordo Seclorum– meaning New Order of the Ages- onto the back of the American one dollar bill are apparent signs that something is afoot on a global scale. By referring to the new political relationship between the US and Russia as a “new world order” in a speech in 1990, George Bush stoked the conspiracy fires.
Prominent names are often dropped into the fold when discussing the theory, such as the Rothchilds, the Du Ponts, the Rockefellers and the Bush family. Through close ties with the IMF, NATO and the United Nations, these families and consortiums plan to use great force and espionage in taking over the world. Extreme believers say that all past major political events are part of the build up toward a single party world domination. To that end, the abolition of slavery, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and even the events of September 11 are part of the plot.

Bilderbergers supersized

Many theories surround the Bilderberg group. From Neo- Nazi anti- Semitism to far left human right activists pointing their fingers, the group have for a long period of time been under severe scrutiny.
The group was founded in 1954 by Polish émigré Joseph Retinger, who was concerned about a perceived growth of anti- Americanism throughout Europe. The political advisor proposed and organised a meeting for world leaders from every country with the purpose of developing a deeper understanding of culture across the Atlantic. The meeting was funded by large scale pro-capitalist organisations- such as the Ford Motor Company- with the intention of forming a political union against the USSR and the threat of worldwide communism.
With such political intentions, and the secrecy behind which the group operates amongst the world’s leaders, it has become a target for many conspiracies. Jonathan Duffy writes, “In Yugoslavia, leading Serbs have blamed Bilderberg for triggering the war which led to the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic. The Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, the London nail-bomber David Copeland and Osama bin Laden are all said to have bought into the theory that Bilderberg pulls the strings with which national governments dance.”
It has also been argued that the group intend to bring the world’s superpower’s to their knees and form a new supra-national structure. By forming a “United World Army,” the group will financially regulate the world economy and microchip the population that will be monitored by a central computer system. Ethics will surround materialism, and life will be centred around a policy of “work, buy, procreate, and sleep.” Those within the Bilderberg, such as Donald Rumsfeld and Peter Sutherland laugh off these claims, but still subscribe to the group’s omerta policy.
Political murder mysteries
The mystery surrounding Benazir Bhutto’s death is not the first incident in politics shrouded in mystery and the unknown. Here are just a few of the deaths that have sparked uproar and intrigue around the world over the past one hundred years

Trotsky killed in cold blood August 21, 1940 – Many questions arose soon after word spread that Leo Trotsky had been murdered at his home with an ice pick, following years of exile. Stalin distanced himself from the murder, but given the timing- Lenin had recently died, and there was a battle for the leadership of the country- many were quick in pointing the finger directly at the future dictator. The official version is that Trotsky was killed by NKVD agent Ramon Mercader, following a struggle in which the former struggled after being hit on the head with the ice pick. Although history books accept that the Man of Steel was directly responsible, many historians still raise feasible issues: was Stalin there to ask Trotsky to subscribe to his own political theories? Was the man dubbed an economic genius murdered at all, or was he kept behind the scenes to aid the development of Stalinism?
Hitler’s suicide April 30, 1945 – Eyebrows are still raised about the death of the face of fascism. When the Fuhrer’s body was found with that of Eva Braun’s, the Second World War effectively ended. The allies quickly reported and rejoiced as news spread that Hitler had taken the “cowardly war out,” ending his and Eva’s lives. But ever since, there have been those who believe there is more to the story: Did Hitler escape to a small town in Southern Austria? Did Stalin intervene before destroying the German army on the Eastern front? Or did members of the SS turn on their leader after Heinrich Himmler went against his Fuhrer’s orders and folded to the Allies? In the 1970s, Hitler’s skull was put on display by the Russian Federal Security Service, the body being “thoroughly cremated.” It has since come to light that the skull does not belong to the dictator.
The assassination of JFK November 22, 1963 – Was it Lee Harvey Oswald or a CIA conspiracy? Although it seems more plausible that a crazed gunman would murder the US president, it has always been asserted that the CIA had more to do with the Dallas assassination than has been attributed to them. Major issues such as a military card found in Oswald’s possession and the termination of a mysterious CIA operation (codenamed AMSPELL) muddy the waters and prolong the chances of the world ever getting to the bottom of the murder of one of America’s favourite sons. Eighty percent of Americans believe Oswald was innocent.

The hottest ticket in town

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There isn’t much to be said about Davos. It’s in Switzerland. It’s situated on a high valley. It’s particularly cold, most likely. However, toward the end of January every year, the tiny municipality attracts the attention of a huge number of VIPs, business heads and world leaders. Essentially, its the cream of the business and politics crop.

Amongst the speakers this year will be former British PM Tony Blair, who in June 2007 joined the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum. James Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase and Company in the United States will be captivating audiences, as will long term member Henry Kissinger. Obviously speakers such as these offer more of an attraction than the freezing temperatures offer discomfort.
The theme to be invested in at this year’s meeting will be ‘The Power of Collaborative Innovation,’ which many of the speakers have been asked to discuss directly. The subtopics- Business, Economics, Geopolitics, Science & Technology, and Values & Society- are the usual categories, but are expected to be directly influenced by the overall theme of the meeting. The topics proposed are in place to affirm a general bearing for the conference, but allow for a certain amount of influence on the part of the speaker. It is this defining characteristic that is said to attract speakers and listeners alike.
Forums and meetings that span the different continents over the course of the year have hammered out issues such as India’s new economy, the future of Saudi Arabia and various correspondences with the Chinese Premier. January’s Annual Meeting provides a review of these sub- meetings, and how the most important issues have taken their toll over the past twelve months. Within this, discussions take place as to how concerns can be dealt with.
Outside of the inner circle of shareholders and members, those expected to attend are of varying backgrounds. That said, most of the guests are of equally high profile. Former US President Bill Clinton is expected to attend, whilst it is rumoured that PM Gordon Brown is keen to get hold of a ticket. An interesting community who will definitely be in attendance is the newly formed Forum of Young Global Leaders. The group is a collection of extraordinary leaders hailing from different disciplines the world over. Each member is less than 40 years old, and so has the potential to infuse a lot of energy to the Annual Meeting. Realising this, Klaus Schwab, Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, has given the YGL his personal endorsement and welcomes their attendance at Davos.
Aside from the usual and expected heated exchanges between those permitted through the front door, a handful of organised demonstrations have taken place as close to the meeting as possible over the last few years. Similar to the majority of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) conferences, disturbances are anticipated, and as such the event normally goes by without outside interference. In fact, one of the issues protestors pursue is that too much money is spent by the Swiss government on security.
Another recent criticism pointed out that in 2003, 100 percent of board members were male. The powers that be have clearly been trying to rectify the deficit, as nearly 30 percent of members attending the Annual Meeting since then have been female.
Another issue is that there are very few NGOs, and even fewer members from the developing world. The theme for this year is an obvious attempt by the organisers to redesign their image, and become more ambassadorial of the world’s population. The organisation has recently presented itself as a worldwide promoter of diversity and humanitarianism, proposing to solve contemporary issues that aren’t necessarily restricted to the world’s elite. In 2005, board members announced that they would be keen to hear from detractors and those critical of the organisation’s format. Since then the establishment’s website has offered a response field by which users can offer advice in the lead up to the more popular summits.
This would seem to be the most likely way to be part of the meeting- membership is $12,500, and tickets to the event in Davos go for $6,250. It’s no surprise that those who make it there are those who really make a difference.
No matter what issues outsiders may want to take up with the World Economic Forum, it is an exceptionally well run organisation. It has a devout support keen to civilize the developing world. It’s membership is made up of some of the world’s most influential and successful personalities. At the same time, it uses familiar faces, such as U2’s Bono, as a means to promote prosperity.

As always the Annual Meeting 2008 will be addressing the future. Topics of discussion are anticipated to be heavily embedded in issues such as the scarcity of resources and global warfare. The cold Swiss winter may be heated by discussions of potential solutions to the world’s problems, by its finest leaders acting as a collective.

Past achievements

2007 German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, set out Germany’s G8 presidency objectives of “growth and responsibility”

2006 Trade officials agree to accelerate talks to achieve a world trade deal. Some 25 trade ministers agreed to move on all key issues – agriculture, services and manufacturing – at the same time

2005 Tony Blair, gets advice on his G-8 policy priorities of poverty alleviation in Africa and climate change. The meeting served as a platform for Mr Blair to launch his G-8 agenda

Is interest cooling in biofuels already?

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Soaring crude oil prices have made alternative biofuels a hot investment, but enthusiasm for the sector has cooled lately. Is this a bubble set to burst? Not likely, but now could be the time to look beyond the top five countries that lead this area.

Doomsayers point to the fact that growth in the biofuels sector slowed in the last quarter of 2007. Analysts at Ernst & Young blamed rising feedstock prices and a rapid expansion in capacity that may outstrip demand.
The firm’s Biofuels Country Attractiveness Indices rank the attractiveness of the top 15 global markets for investment in biofuels. Crude oil prices have reached record highs, which ought to have boosted demand in the industry. But toughening global conditions have resulted in a fall in investment across the Indices.
The areas hit hardest are the mainstream markets of the US, Brazil and Europe, says Jonathan Johns, Head of Renewable Energy at Ernst & Young. He now sees a period of consolidation where companies working in biofuels will need supply chain control and deep pockets to weather a downturn.
Here are the prospects for the top five markets, and a few outsiders to watch:
1 The US
The US is still top dog, but the market is slowing. High feedstock prices are hampering investment in biofuels. There are also problems with overcapacity and distribution. Essentially, the US has become a victim of its own success in this area: “Producers are facing difficulties transporting the biofuels along traditional fossil fuel networks, because of sheer volume.” Says Johns.
2 Brazil
Brazil is also suffering from higher feedstock prices and distribution problems. Domestic markets for biofuels are strong, but to make progress producers need deals with developed nations – that’s proving a tough nut to crack.
3 France
Europe might be slowing, but France is doing OK. Previously fourth in the top five, it leapfrogged Germany to take this spot. France is now the second biggest consumer of biofuel in the European Union – up 63 percent in a year. “There is immense potential for innovative biofuel projects in France,” says Philippe Favre, President of the Invest in France Agency.

4 Germany
Germany lost third place to France. The government’s announcement of full tax breaks for ethanol was good news, but most vehicles in Germany run on diesel, which is harder to blend with ethanol.

5 Spain
Growth here is expected to stall after the government did a fuel U–turn. It was going to make targets for biofuel use mandatory, but switched them to voluntary instead.
Looking outside the top five
The best news for investors came out of the UK, ranked number seven in the world by Ernst & Young. After three years of wrangling, the government has passed laws requiring fuel suppliers to make 2.5 percent of their total fuel sales from renewable sources during 2008–2009. “This will send a clear message to investors that the UK is serious about the future role of biofuels in driving the nation forward towards a lower carbon economy,” said Johns.

Why RFID is nearing its tipping point

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The implementation of RFID tracking could revolutionise supply chain logistics. With a lack of cohesive standards, many industry sectors have been slow off the mark, but new schemes being piloted at the moment could lead to far wider application.

RFID tracking is a great idea. Stick a tag on any item, and you can check wherever it is in the world. The potential benefits to the supply chain all around the world are enormous. Some major roadblocks have slowed mass adoption of this panacea– in–waiting, but the technology may finally have reached its tipping point.

RFID allows a company to scan and track radio frequency tags on inpidual items, be they packing cases, pallets, CDs, books or even clothing.

The tags carry Electronic Product Codes that describe what’s inside, who made it and where it has come from. A lack of agreed technology standards has up until now slowed the widespread implementation of RFID. But these barriers are gradually coming down.

There are pilot schemes underway in some of Europe’s most important industry sectors, and the results look promising. The comprehensive roll–out of RFID is starting to look inevitable.

“The technology has evolved dramatically in terms of performance, quality and costs,” says Henri Barthel, coordinator of a European Union–funded project called Bridge, which has been organising pilots. Barthel says that as the technical, commercial and political barriers to RFID come down, the total number of tags purchased annually in Europe will rocket from 144 million in 2007 to 86.7 billion in 2022.

The total number of locations with RFID readers in Europe should increase from a little over 2,500 to around 450,000 during that 15–year period. And the number of RFID readers should increase from a few thousand to more than 6 million, Barthel says.

What’s needed to tip RFID to mass adoption?

1 Agreed standards on how the technology works

2 Scanners and chips that are “plug–and–play” – no thinking required

3 Clear evidence of return on investment “When these three parameters converge there will be massive adoption compared to what we see today,” says Barthel.

Taking cost out is key to mass RFID implementation. Even where pilots show a good return on investment, companies, particularly multinationals, often baulk at the massive investments they would need to deliver a comprehensive RFID–enabled operation.

French retailer Carrefour and its supplier Benedicta are two of the companies involved in pilots. They are tracking a range of reusable assets, including pallets and crates with RFID tags and sharing the information between to increase their efficiencies.

Kaufhof, the major German department store, is sharing RFID–generated information with Gardeur, its garment supplier, and testing the benefits of in–store applications, such as “smart” shelves fitted with RFID readers.

In another pilot, electronics giant Sony is looking for cost– savings and efficiencies in its service operations, using RFID tags to track products and parts between its Spanish factory, its Dutch warehouse hub and its German store and service centres.

Barthel is confident the technology will prove itself and that RFID will reach a mass market. Each RFID solution that the Bridge project nails down helps the movement towards agreed standards and lower cost implementation, says Barthel.

RFID hasn’t got there yet, but it might not be long now.

The death knell for dinosaurs of leadership

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Pigeon-holing different types of business professionals is often like shooting fish in a barrel but surprisingly, it usually holds up to scrutiny. Neil Baker discusses the types of personality who often make it – or don’t – in business leadership.

A New Economy needs a new kind of business leader. Control freaks and messianic visionaries are out – make way for the Eco–leaders. Look at 100 years of research on management – and mismanagement – and you’ll find four main approaches to leadership.
Three are past their sell–by dates; there’s just one suited to the businesses of the future. Here’s the lowdown:
1 The control freak
Management by clipboard was the model in the early 20th century. The Control Freak believes that a business can be run along scientific lines. Factories and markets are rational and predictable places: gather enough data about what employees do and how long it takes, for example, and you can make a business super–efficient. Some businesses still work this way – call centres are the obvious examples. But then people hate to work in call centres for a reason.
2 The caring sharer
Don’t time how long your staff spend on their breaks, try to empathise with them. Develop your emotional intelligence to coach management, staff and your fellow co–leaders. This is the way of The Caring Sharer. People might feel better, but does the business make any more money?

3 The visionary
This is – or was – the dominant leadership style of American capitalism. Beloved of politicians, too. It’s hero worship, pure and simple. The Visionary is the man with the persuasive personality and a Big Idea, if not always the plan to make it happen. Think Bernie Ebbers at WorldCom.

4 The eco-leader
The collapse of WorldCom, Enron and others, is helping to usher in something new. All that nefarious wrongdoing prompted a paradigm shift. Companies now need to share leadership around – let teams of people lead, not the guy with the biggest ego; let people make their own decisions. Don’t milk the bottom line for shareholders; build networks and relationships with stakeholders. This is Eco–leadership. Is this the future? The trick, it seems, is to make sure the leader – or leaders – of a business has the same values as its customers.
Not much new about that, but the things customers believe in have changed a lot over the last 100 years.

Email is dead… Long live email

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Although it has only become a prevalent means of communication in the last 10 to 15 years, email is already showing its age with younger users turning to social networking alternatives. The New Economy looks at the death and rebirth of email.

Dead-mail

Email is too slow. Usage is certainly falling among American teenagers. It was down by eight percent last year, according to research from ComScore Media Metrix. In search of quicker and more fluid ways to stay in touch with friends, teenagers are using tools such as Instant Messaging, SMS texting and Twitter. They only use email to talk to “old people”, according to a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Email is not cool… but social networking is. Teenagers are turning to sites like MySpace (75 percent of US market) and Facebook (13 percent). Why bother with email, when you can broadcast your life to your “friends”.

Email is full of spam. Bill Gates promised to block it, but couldn’t. Some estimates say as much as 80 percent of email traffic in the US is spam. No communication system can survive a “noise–to–signal” ratio of 80–20. The failure to kill spam is killing email.

Live-mail

No doubt those are compelling reasons to give up on email, if you are a thirteen year–old living in Idaho. But teenagers don’t run the world – yet. Here are some reasons why email is alive and well, and looks like staying that way.

Cool wears off. Teenagers might like “cool” technologies like Twitter, but when they grow up the value of cool gets replaced by the value of useful. Email might not be cool, but it will survive because it is useful. The comScore stats on falling teen email usage quoted above grabbed the headlines, but the same research found that e–mailing by users of all ages was up six percent.

Work gets in the way. Social networking might be fun, but employer patience is running out. The recent popularity of sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo in the UK, for example, is costing corporations close to £6.5bn annually in lost productivity, according to a survey by Global Secure Systems. Chief information security officers said in one study that one of their biggest IT concerns for 2008 was how to manage social networking sites at work. Many estimated that between 15 percent and 20 percent of their current bandwidth is taken up with social networking sites. Another study found that 63 percent of businesses were planning to monitor or limit staff access to such sites and 17 percent plan to ban access at work completely over the next six months.

We are not all monkeys. Texting and messaging are great for what anthropologists call social grooming. Monkeys, for example, form social bonds by picking fleas off each other; humans do it with brief hellos, nods in the street, letting others know we are still alive. Thumb–typed 158–character messages are great for that, but less good at communicating anything more meaningful.

Private investigations

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With government funding and R&D budgets cut as part of austerity drives, the next generation of scientific breakthroughs may be made by amateurs

With deficit cutting a priority in US and Europe, funding in the sciences is suffering. Without the money to continue, projects are being scrapped across all areas, such as the termination of the space shuttle programme by NASA.

It may take a decade for government funding to be able to support pre-recession science funding budgets. For enthusiasts the drive for progress won’t wait that long.

As a result, a number of private and amateur projects have got underway – with big scientific goals on their mind – particularly in the field of rocketry.

Private space travel ventures have been in the works for some time. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, currently at the testing stage, promises to take privileged customers to the edge of space within the next few years. Space Exploration Technologies however, aims to do better. Founded by PayPal creator Elon Musk on the principles of “simplicity, low-cost, and reliability”, SpaceX was set up as a private space venture, with the aim of sending both manned and unmanned vehicles into space.

The company launched its first orbital rocket – Falcon 1 – in 2008. It has since built on this achievement with subsequent flights of its Falcon 9 rocket. The company is targeting the private market for the deployment of orbital equipment at approximately $300m – around 40 percent of the price charged by government programmes. So effective is the company at achieving its goals, NASA has provided funding for SpaceX to build rockets to carry cargo and eventually passengers to the International Space Station, with a launch planned for this coming November.

On an even less grand budget, a Danish team of amateur rocketeers are aiming for manned orbit on a budget of around $40,000. Funded by donations, Copenhagen Suborbitals is already at the testing stage with its rocket, HEAT 4. Unmanned rockets have so far achieved heights of around three kilometres, though tests have experienced notable problems including parachute failure. However, within three to five years it is expected these amateurs will accomplish the equivalent of Yuri Gagarin’s flight in 1961 at a fraction of the costs spent by the Soviet Union.

It’s not only in the field of rocketry where amateurs are having an impact. Sciences ranging from butterfly tracking and conservation to finding cures for Parkinson’s disease and cancer are all being undertaken to greater or lesser success, with the internet proving an indispensible tool in sharing findings and generating support.

Clearly though, there are limits to what can be achieved through amateur science. In August, a Swedish man was arrested by police after a tip off by the Swedish Nuclear Authority. A search of Richard Handl’s flat in Angelholm found radium, americium and uranium. Far from a sinister plot however, the man explained he had been trying to split the atom – in his kitchen.

Handl is said to be a keen amateur physicist and had kept a blog of his progress. He had tried to combine the radioactive elements – bought online as part of old smoke detectors – by immersing them together in 96 percent pure sulphuric acid and heating them on his kitchen stove. He was the one who had contacted the nuclear authority after he began to question the legality of what he was doing.

Up to his arrest, Handl had, luckily, been unsuccessful in his attempts, only managing to create a ‘meltdown’ on his cooker. Police have since released him, finding him to pose no threat to society. This case illustrates that while private endeavour looks set to capitalise on subdued publicly-funded science institutions, amateurs need to set a limit to their ambitions.