Archive for the ‘energy’ Category
Wind Turbine Hush Money
Filed under: energy, environment, health, protest, regulations |
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In Oregon, the “whoosh, whoosh, whoosh” of wind turbines is being partly drowned out by another sound: “Hush, hush, hush….”
What are we to think when a company starts paying people substantial sums of money not to complain about the effects of their projects? Is that illicit hush money, or is it a company facing up to its impact and paying due compensation?
Here’s the story, by William Yardley, for the New York Times: Turbines Too Loud? Here, Take $5,000.
IONE, Ore. — Residents of the remote high-desert hills near here have had an unusual visitor recently, a fixer working out the kinks in clean energy.
Patricia Pilz of Caithness Energy, a big company from New York that is helping make this part of Eastern Oregon one of the fastest-growing wind power regions in the country, is making a tempting offer: sign a waiver saying you will not complain about excessive noise from the turning turbines — the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of the future, advocates say — and she will cut you a check for $5,000.
“Shall we call it hush money?” said one longtime farmer, George Griffith, 84. “It was about as easy as easy money can get….”
The effects that a production process (such as a wind farm) has on people other than its paying customers are what are called “externalities” — effects that are external to some voluntary transaction. And in principle, compensating those who suffer externalities is the right thing to do — it means that a company (and its customers) are paying something closer to the full cost of production. Otherwise, externalities amount to a cost foisted on someone else involuntarily.
OK: so far, so good. The company involved here is attempting to (as an economist would put it) internalize its externalities, by compensating those affected by noise from its windmills. But what about the price set? Note that the price was an apparently invariable $5,000. Why? After all, different people are likely to be affected differently, and some will be more noise-tolerant than others.
So, why one price? According to the company, the reason is fairness:
“What we don’t do in general is change the market price for a waiver,” [Caithness Energy’s] Ms. Pilz said. “That’s not fair.”
Of course, equal payment for all is one version of fairness, but it’s not the only one.
One last theme to pick up on is the tension between what’s good for the individual and what’s good for society. The company involved, here, attempted to play the “social good” card:
Some people who did not sign said that Ms. Pilz made them feel uncomfortable, that she talked about how much Shepherd’s Flat would benefit the struggling local economy and the nation’s energy goals, and that she suggested they were not thinking of the greater good if they refused.
It’s a good rhetorical move on the company’s part, not least because there’s more than a grain of truth to it. A project of this size is bound to benefit the local economy (though perhaps not as much as locals might hope). Add to that the fact that this is, after all, clean energy that’s being produced, the kind of energy that most people now figure is essential to weaning us off our collective addiction to petroleum products.
So, let’s put this on the table as a fundamental truth: there are no centralized forms of energy production, clean or otherwise, that will not have a negative impact on anyone, and that hence won’t be subject to someone’s objections. So the question is not whether anyone will be negatively affected (or even merely inconvenienced), but rather who will be negatively affected, and how much, and what to do about it.
Boycotting BP is Futile and Unethical
Do not boycott BP.
I know you’re mad. I am too. But a boycott won’t accomplish any of the things you’re trying to accomplish. And it’s unethical.
The push to boycott BP (as a punitive response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, obviously) comes from the advocacy group Public Citizen, which encourages you to: “Boycott BP: Take the Beyond BP Pledge today!” There’s also the inevitable Facebook group, Boycott BP.
This move is well-intentioned, but entirely wrong-headed, for a number of reasons.
The first reason has to do with alternatives. Sharon Begley at Newsweek, with the sarcastic title “Boycott BP! Because it’s much better to give your money to Exxon.” It’s highly unlikely that those who participate in this boycott are going to eschew gas purchases altogether. With a few exceptions, they’re much more likely to simply start buying their gas at the non-BP station down the street. And, as Begley points out, as far as the oil companies providing the oil go, good luck finding one that meets your high ethical standards — or even minimally decent ones. Every oil company you can name is in roughly the same moral category. So boycotting BP just means jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Second, there’s the fact that a boycott of BP gas stations won’t actually hurt the organization you’re trying to hurt. In practice, “boycotting BP” means boycotting BP-branded retail outlets. And as an editorial in the LA Times pointed out, “BP stations are independently owned, so a boycott hurts individual retailers more than London-based BP.” So, sure, boycott BP stations — that is, if your goal is to hurt a bunch of small businesses already operating on razor-thin profit margins. Put a few minimum-wage gas jockeys and cashiers out of work. The difference simply will not be felt at BP’s head office. (The same naturally goes for vandalism of BP stations, which is both unethical and criminal.)
Finally, there’s the question of tokenism. Buying gas for your car is far from the only way many of us indirectly buy from BP on a regular basis. As “DanH” points out in the Comments section of this blog entry, (see comment at June 3rd, 2010 2:52 pm) BP also makes home-heating fuel, airline fuel, ingredients for plastics, and the natural gas from which much electricity is generated. Oh, and solar panels — BP makes those, too. If you want to make this boycott real (which you shouldn’t) you’ve got to boycott those things, too.
Can consumers take action? Sure they can, by doing things — long-term things — to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels. They can also write their elected representatives to encourage tougher regulation of risky practices like deep-water drilling. And so on. I know, I know: in the immortal words of Homer Simpson, “But I’m mad now!“ Well, then direct the righteous indignation you’re feeling now toward change that will make the world better for the future.
It’s fine to be angry about this disastrous oil-spill. Being angry is entirely appropriate. And it’s good to want to do something. But do the right thing, not the first thing that comes to mind.
(Tip of the hat to AP.)
BP: Not Really “Beyond Petroleum,” Just Greenwash After All
When British Petroleum rebranded itself a few years ago as just “BP,” it adopted the tagline “Beyond Petroleum,” in an attempt to signal a commitment to new energy technologies, and to new ways of doing business.
Of course, there were skeptics. Back in 2000, CorpWatch had this to say about the rebranding:
BP’s re-branding as the “Beyond Petroleum” company is perhaps the ultimate co-optation of environmentalists’ language and message. Even apart from the twisting of language, BP’s suggestion that producing more natural gas is somehow akin to global leadership is preposterous. Make that Beyond Preposterous.
So, the accusation was basically one of greenwash — essentially, an attempt to mask a lousy environmental record with a thin patina of environmental commitment. Had I commented back in 2000, I might have suggested that it was too early, then, to confidently accuse the company of greenwash. Sometimes companies do undergo substantial changes — changes in policy, in culture, and in leadership. The worry then is that if we criticize or mock a company’s stated intention to turn over a new-and-greener leaf, we may actually be doing more harm than good by taking the wind out of the sails of what might actually be positive change.
OK, fast-forward to 2010, to the biggest oil spill in U.S. history and to the Center for Public Integrity stating that BP accounts for “97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry by government safety inspectors over the past three years”.
Greenwashing? Case closed, as far as public opinion of BP is concerned. And perhaps more importantly, it now becomes just that much harder for the public to take seriously any big company’s claim that it really wants to improve its environmental performance.
Questions About the BP Oil Disaster
There’s been an enormous amount of reporting and commentary about the disaster at BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig and the ensuing oil spill. One of the challenges of blogging about this story, from an ethics point of view, is figuring out where to begin. The story of the Deepwater Horizon is such a rich and complex one that Business Ethics profs will be teaching this case for decades.
Of course, what questions we need to ask depends in large part on what our purposes are. But the meta-question (“Which question is the right question?”) is still worth asking, not least because at least some of the questions currently being asked may not be a) fruitful or b) answerable.
So, what’s the right question to be asking about the worst oil spill in U.S. history?
Here’s a very incomplete list of possible questions:
- Who is to blame? BP’s CEO? BP as a whole? The rig’s foreman? The crewmembers directly involved? Transocean (the owner of the rig)? Halliburton (subcontractor for a crucial element of the drilling operation)? The U.S. Government’s Minerals Management Service? Or, more appropriately, we could ask: what’s the right way to apportion blame among those individuals and organizations?
- What role did the pursuit of profit play? Are there other, more important, ideas likely to have influenced the mind-set of the persons most directly responsible?
- Who is (ethically) responsible for cleaning up the mess — BP? The U.S. government? Coastal state governments? (Note that that question is in principle different from the one above.)
- What penalties should companies pay in the aftermath of an oil spill? (See the discussion at the excellent Marginal Revolution blog, here.)
- Is there anything ethically unique about the Deepwater Horizon disaster, or is it “just” another disaster like others we’ve seen before?
- Assuming that oil spills, big or small, are more-or-less inevitable, are such spills an acceptable cost of our unfortunate addiction to oil? As the old saying goes, “you can’t bake a cake without breaking a few eggs.” Does that apply here?
- What cultural factors within BP are likely to have played a positive or negative role? Or, since most of us don’t know much about the corporate culture at BP, what might be the crucial variables here? What should we want to know about BP’s (or Halliburton’s) corporate culture?
- If you were a senior executive at another oil company, how would or how should your day tomorrow look different than a randomly-selected day before the blowout on the Deepwater Horizon? That is, is there anything for other companies to learn, here?
- Beyond the massive cleanup to be carried out over the coming years (and it will be years), what should be on BP’s agenda for the next few years? What should BP (and Transocean and Halliburton) learn from this?
- Does this incident prove that regulations are too lax? After all, no system of regulation is perfect. Even tough laws against murder don’t bring the murder rate to zero. Did this disaster happen because of, or in spite of, the current regulatory regime?
- Would your own moral reaction to the Deepwater Horizon spill be different if you were an employee of BP (say, an employee not directly involved)? Or if you were a BP shareholder?
- Should shareholders in BP feel bad about this? If you think they should feel bad, should they feel more, or less, responsible than, say, BP’s customers?
So, if there’s anything to be learned from this disaster, what questions should we be asking?
I should add the one thing I know for sure about the questions listed above: none of the presents an easy, obvious answer.
Greenwashing the Tar Sands
Regular readers will know that I have an interest in what’s often referred to as “greenwashing”.
Here’s a good example. An ad for Suncor (a big Canadian energy company) appeared in a recent issue of Canadian Business Magazine (May 10, p.24). The ad includes the obligatory green imagery (excerpted at left). The text of the ad reads as follows:
“As Canada’s premier integrated energy company, Suncor has achieved success by seening the possibilities. Developing Canada’s oil sands, as well as energy resources from coast to coast and beyond, brings us even more opportunity to take action on environmental issues. Just as innovation made oil sands production viable, new technology is helping us reduce our impact on air, land and water. For Suncor, seeing the possibilities is the first step towards responsible development.”
What makes this greenwash? Well, to start with, there’s the green imagery and allusions. The pretty picture, and the vague reference to “taking action on environmental issues,” etc. Put that against the backdrop of Suncor’s reality: the oil sands (a.k.a. “tar sands”) are an undeniably dirty source of energy, and more generally the company’s environmental record is far from stellar. Now, it’s worth noting that this ad goes beyond mere associative advertising. Suncor isn’t just trying to put its name next to a pretty picture of trees and fluffy clouds. The ad cites stats. In particular, it brags about:
- “45% decrease in GHG [greenhouse gas] emission intensity at oil sands based on progress to to the end of 2008 compared to 1990 baseline.” Sounds good, but is it? How does that compare to other companies? Is that a legislated reduction, or voluntary?
- “22% decrease in absolute water use at oil sands from 2003 to 2008.” Again, sounds good. But while “absolute” (i.e., total) water usage is important, a reduction in that doesn’t necessarily imply an improvement in methods. It could just as easily imply a change in overall production.
- “$750 million actual and planned investments in renewable energy.” Again, a big number. But not quite so big once you consider that Suncor is a company with over $30 billion in revenues each year. And most importantly, notice that the $750 million includes planned investments. In other words, the company is taking credit for stuff it hasn’t done yet, or even (as far as we can tell) started.
So, what’s wrong with the ad? Are there any lies? Not literally, I think. And probably no lies in the sense of false claims that would be actionable under false advertising legislation. Is the misleading? Well, it’s certainly a rather glossy portrayal of a company engaged in a dirty business. So, like other examples of greenwashing, it’s a distraction from the truth. It attempts a bit of sleight-of-hand. Is a stage magician lying when he distracts you with the flowers in his right hand while his left hand dips into his pocket to retrieve the missing coin? No, not really. But then, the magician is offering entertainment, making our lives better. Greenwash offers a form of distraction that does little more than muddy the waters of discourse about corporate environmental responsibility.
(Thanks to Robin Hansen for showing me the ad and pointing out the greenwash.)
Ethical to Teach a Bogus Therapy?
Filed under: critical thinking, education, energy, fraud, health |
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Needless to say, the industry I myself work in — higher education — is in no way immune from sub-par business ethics. (Those of us involved in the teaching end of higher education don’t like to think of it as a business, but at some level that’s what it is, as long as a fee is being charged.) And what else can I call it but bad ethics, when a university offers courses teaching students to manipulate forces that don’t exist in order to generate effects that don’t happen?
Check out this article, from Common Ground magazine: Integrative energy healing
The Integrative Energy Healing (IEH) Certificate Program at Langara College in Vancouver is actively involved in weaving together the science and research of energy-based healing with its practice. For eight years, this program has worked to offer a three-year certificate program in IEH, which offers an in-depth study of the various Eastern and Western scientific theories underlying energy-based healing. It is also an exploration of the human condition and the practice of different types of energy-based treatments….
Here’s Langara’s page about its Integrative Energy Healing. (And for good measure, here’s the page about its Holistic Healing & Skills program.)
Sounds groovy. The problem: they’re teaching something that doesn’t work. “Energy Healing” is part of a cluster of practices that claims to diagnose and treat illness by examining and modifying energy fields that flow around and through the human body. These practices have been pretty well investigated, and they’re simply baseless. The physical starting points of these practices conflict with fundamental physics, and experiments have proven that they just don’t work. One of the main sources supposedly supporting the value of energy medicine, cited in the article above, is Energy Medicine (Oschman, 2000).
Here’s an article reviewing Oschman’s book: Energy Medicine, reprinted from Skeptic Magazine. The review is pretty devastating.
Of course, it’s not hard to find others who have found Energy “Medicine” at least worth looking at. The Common Ground article cites the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) “formally recognizes and encourages the study of energy therapies.” What the article leaves out is that funding has so far turned up zero in the way of useful therapies, and there have recently been significant calls by scientists for the NIH to stop funding this pseudoscience.
So, what is there to say about a university teaching this stuff? Well, to the extent that students believe they’re learning real health science, they’re being ripped off. And since the practices being taught are part of the enormous alternative medicine industry, students are being taught a set of practices intended to be sold to customers: they’re being taught to sell a bogus product. Oh, and in the process, Langara is cheapening the entire notion of higher education.
A final thought, for those of you not yet convinced that it’s problematic for an institution of higher learning to be teaching a highly-questionable practice like “Energy Healing.” What would our reaction be if a parallel university-based programme were started up with the intention not of teaching students to “heal” patients, but to build bridges? What if, instead of using math and physics to build bridges safely, we taught engineers to simply lay their hands on iron beams to “feel” whether they were strong enough?
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Addendum:
Just a bit of clarification: the story above is about Langara College. But I refer to it throughout as “a university.” Technically, colleges & universities are different kinds of institutions in Canada (they’re provincially regulated & mostly provincially funded, so the details vary). But everything I say above applies to higher education institutions of all kinds.
Wal-Mart: The Transformative Power of a Transformed Company
Here’s an interesting story about Wal-Mart’s decision, back in 2005, to ‘go green.’
From the NY Times: Green-Light Specials, Now at Wal-Mart.
Two grand themes emerge in the story. Both are about massive transformations.
One is the story of Wal-Mart’s attempt to use its enormous size, and its enormous influence over its supply-chain, to do what very few companies can do: have a significant (positive) impact on the environment.
By virtue of its herculean size, Wal-Mart eventually dragged much of corporate America along with it, leading mighty suppliers like General Electric and Procter & Gamble to transform their own business practices.
Under Mr. [Lee] Scott, who is retiring this month at the age of 59, the company that democratized consumption in the United States — enabling working-class families to buy former luxuries like inexpensive flat-screen televisions, down comforters and porterhouse steaks — has begun to democratize environmental sustainability.
For decades, many consumers felt that going green was a luxury, too, reserved primarily for those with enough money — and time on their hands — to buy groceries at natural food stores and organic clothing from specialty retailers.
(For previous postings on Wal-Mart and the environment, see here and here.)
The second grand theme of the story is the transformation of Wal-Mart into the kind of company that, by all appearances, wants to have the kind of positive impact alluded to above.
“It wasn’t a matter of telling our story better,” said Mr. Scott said in recent interview. “We had to create a better story.”
WAL-MART, of course, didn’t change overnight. It was pushed — or, more accurately, shoved — into wrenching reforms.
When Mr. Scott became chief executive in 2000, the company was a Wall Street darling. With nearly 4,000 stores and more than a million employees, it had edged out Goliaths like Sears and Kmart. But its size and success invited scrutiny. In 2005, two union-backed groups, Wal-Mart Watch and Wake Up Wal-Mart, set up shop in Washington and started a public relations assault against the company.
Some of you may have noticed that I implied above that having a positive impact was something that Wal-Mart (rather than, say, Mr. Scott, or the Board) “wanted.” Some people are skeptical about corporations (or other composite entities) “wanting” or “believing” or having other such mental states. But if you don’t take it too literally, you see it makes sense. As of 2009, Wal-Mart, as a whole, wants to play a certain kind of role. Now the reasons for Wal-Mart wanting that are pretty complex. In fact, I think at the level of reasons, that’s where we should say “No, corporations don’t have those.” If you want the reasons why Wal-Mart wants what it wants, you have to look at the many and diverse reasons why the different people that make up Wal-Mart want the company to play that role.
Taking Your Hybrid to the Carwash Greenwash
Filed under: consumers, energy, environment, greenwashing, sustainability, technology |
Leave a comment Wired featured the following story yesterday: Hybrids, We Never Knew Ya (by John Gartner), about the fact that not all “hybrid” cars are as environmentally progressive as the name seems to imply.
Marketers are jumping on the green-car movement and the gears are audibly grinding over what counts as a “hybrid vehicle.”
First applied to small sedans emphasizing fuel economy, the term is now blithely used to encompass a vast array of trucks, SUVs and luxury cars that in some cases offer only modest fuel savings over traditional vehicles, some critics charge.
…
Scott Nathanson, the national field organizer for environmental activist group the Union of Concerned Scientists (or UCS), contends the term “hybrid” is confusing at best and misleading at worst. “People think that it if you slap a hybrid label on something, that makes it a green vehicle,” he said. Not so.According to UCS, the upcoming 2007 Saturn Vue Green Line SUV along with the GMC Sierra and Chevy Silverado hybrids, make claims that are “hollow” and classify them as “mild hybrids” that should not be considered the same class of vehicles.
Nathanson said that while the Saturn Vue hybrid includes useful fuel-saving features such as deactivating cylinders when not in use and shutting off the engine while idling, a hybrid should include a battery with a minimum of 60 volts of electricity. By way of comparison, the Saturn hybrid’s batteries (produced by Ovonics’ subsidiary Cobasys) are rated at 36 volts, while the Toyota Camry hybrid includes 244-volt batteries.
While hybrid vehicles from Honda, Toyota, Ford and Lexus include battery packs that can recover substantial amounts of energy from the braking system (known as regenerative braking), the Saturn hybrid battery pack “doesn’t have sufficient power to provide an assist to the engine,” according to Nathanson.
The worry, here, is that at least some so-called “hybrids” are being promoted as part of an effort at “Greenwashing.” “Greenwashing” is a pejorative term derived from the term “whitewashing,” coined by environmental activists to describe efforts by corporations to portray themselves as environmentally responsible in order to mask environmental wrongdoings. (Melissa Whellams & I have written an article on Greenwashing in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Business Ethics & Society) So, it seems in this case, certain auto manufacturers (some with really awful environmental records) are putting a handful of vehicles on the market that can technically qualify as “hybrids”. By doing so, the companies stand to improve their reputation in terms of environmental performance, without actually making any real commitment to improving actual environmental performance.
The problem with accusations of greenwashing, of course, is that a lot depends on a corporation’s intentions, and intentions are notoriously difficult to read. If a given company produces just a handful of hybrid cars, while churning out gas-guzzling SUV’s by the millions, is that deceptive greenwashing or the first step towards real improvements? If a company markets what the story above calls a “mild hybrid” (one with an electrical system too weak to do much good), is that a half-hearted effort, or an engineering stepping-stone to something better?
The Business Ethics Blog 