The Problem
Can we change the world for the better?
Our future is looking increasingly uncertain – the environment and our economy are both under huge pressure. And while there are heated debates about whom or what is contributing most to that pressure, we can all agree on two things:
- Pollution is a ‘bad thing’. We are polluting our environment, poisoning the air we breathe and the land and seas that provide our food. We’re slowly poisoning ourselves and our children
- Waste is a ‘bad thing’. We’re wasting limited resources at a terrifying rate, creating shortages. Prices will inevitably rise and our future will become more volatile and frightening
There are many ways to live a less polluting and wasteful lifestyle and there are many great people and publishers that promote those lifestyles.
But you need to follow the money…
In reality, it is financial markets that drive most of the world’s activity. For every single dollar, euro, pound or yen traded in the real world economy on real goods and services, 26 (that’s twenty-six) are traded in shares, commodities, derivatives and currency. For every pound spent on low energy light bulbs, £26 is traded on currency, derivative or stock markets. It’s what we invest in that shapes our economy, which then creates the pollution and waste.
What very few invest in, will shape everyone’s future
Blue & Green Tomorrow follows the money and asks tough questions of private and institutional investors about the future they are investing in.
If we can encourage more people and institutions to invest in companies that are sustainable and then buy more from those same companies, we can harness the considerable power of financial markets to make the world a better place.
We want to tell you about the people and organisations that are doing amazing things in science, technology, construction, business, agriculture, forestry, social enterprise, charity and finance; the ones who are reducing pollution and waste in all their forms; the ones who are building a better tomorrow and represent the most exciting opportunities for investment today.
We want the world to be as blue and green tomorrow as it was yesterday.
Can you change the world for the better? There is no plan(et) B.
How it will work
We write about the people and organisations that are making a difference every single day.
At Blue & Green Tomorrow, we believe in great long-form journalism. Journalism that is evidence-based, impartial, optimistic and responsible. But, great journalism costs and advertisers often want to pay for favourable or ‘bad’ journalism.
Corporate and government press releases aren’t journalism.
That’s why we need your help.
Each month we want to produce an in-depth report on one aspect of sustainability.
Where you come in
Planned reports for the remainder of 2012 will cover:
- Sustainable banking
- Sustainable investment: Part 2
- Ethical retail
- Responsible media – post-Leveson
We’ve already produced three reports, on investment, tourism and energy to show you what we can create and together they’ve been read by over 30,000 people.
We want this to be about our readers rather than advertiser or corporate interests, so if you can help us by pledging as little as £10, we can do this together.
What the money pays for
It pays for the reports - our researchers, writers, sub-editing and designers. Most importantly though, it pays for distribution to the widest possible audience possible. If we can get the reports into the hands of political and business decision-makers as well as the wealthiest investors we might just get them to make some better decisions about what they invest in. Critically we aren't preaching to the converted but hitting those who might even be sceptical about climate change and its causes.
Who are we?
Blue & Green Tomorrow is run by ex-media (Northcliffe Newspapers, Daily Telegraph, Auto Trader and Emap) and financial services (Abbey, Barclays, AXA, Prudential and Fidelity) chap, Simon Leadbetter. He founded the digital magazine Blue & Green Tomorrow to merge his media and financial services experience with the aim of promoting a step change in sustainable investment.
We are staffed by recent graduates providing experience for those with the fewest opportunities in the current economic climate – ably supported by talented and experienced journalists. Leading them is first class honours graduate and Blue & Green stalwart and Editor, Alex Blackburne. The 'all-I-want-to-be-is-a-sports-journalist' when he joined, soon became an expert and quoted writer on sustainable investment and clean energy.
Our award-winning (as judged by David McCandless of Information is Beautiful fame) and seriously-talented data journalist Ben Willers produces infographics that will blow your mind as pieces of information and artwork in their own right.
Join in
We can’t do this without your help.
With your support we can create the reports. With your support we can get the reports into the hands of investors and decision-makers. And maybe, just maybe change the world by convincing more wealthy and powerful people to invest and consume sustainably.
To help, you can pledge anything from the cost of coffees with friends to a £2,500 biggest fan level.
For as little as £10 you’ll help us and receive a limited edition infographic postcard from our award-winning infographic designer.
For just £250, you will join our editorial board guiding the direction of the title and helping us commission articles and decide the focus of our in-depth reports.
If you, a friend or family member or colleague could pledge even a little, we can make a difference and produce the independent evidence-based journalism that is sorely lacking in one of the most important debates of our time.
Our climate is changing and what we do today will echo down the generations tomorrow.
“Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us.”
Henrik Tikkanen
Sir Winston Churchill once said, “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm”. We didn’t hit our ambitious crowdfunding target, but we underwrote the team until the end of the year and for that we are indebted.
Earlier this week, we described the genesis and evolution of Blue & Green Tomorrow. We also closed our Sponsume crowdfunding campaign, raising enough funds to allow the team to sleep in their beds knowing that they’ll be paid until Christmas, and to help the production and distribution of two more in-depth reports before this year’s out – The Guide to Ethical Shopping and The Guide to Responsible Media.
“People don’t have to like or support you, so you always have to say thank you”
To everyone who supported us, we want to say thank you. We are preparing your rewards, which will be with you by Christmas.
To the 41,000 unique visitors and our 12,000 regular readers, we want to say thank you. Keep reading and if you want to contribute, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
To the early adopter band of superb IFAs, Good Energy, Ethical Superstore, Original Travel, Charity Bank, Reliance Bank, Triodos Bank, Virgin Climate Change Fund and Quadris Environmental Forestry Fund who have supported us since we started, we want to say thank you.
To the exceptional explorers and tour operators of Adventure Travel, Discover Ltd, Wild Frontiers,Cedarberg African Travel and Archipelago Choice, we want to say thank you.
To the various people who have worked under the umbrella of B> David, Lori, Dominic, Angus, Charlotte, Rob, Alex, Rich, Jess, Emily, plus many, many more, we want to say thank you.
The next chapter: 2013
2013 is going to be an interesting year if we survive the end of the Mayan long count calendar on December 21. We will, by the way. It’s superstitious hokum, described by one leading academic as, “a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in”.
In January, we will see the inauguration of the next US president. There will also be an international academic conference in June to celebrate 200 years of peace between the US, Canada and Great Britain.
In January, Israel elects a new parliament and Iran elects a president in June, which could affect us all and be one of the first big international headaches for the new US president.
China’s new leadership will be settling into the start of their 10-year rule, while attempting its first unmanned Moon landing. India will launch its Mars probe.
It’s the UN’s International Year of Water Cooperation, which seems apposite if you consider the words of Ismail Serageldin, former vice president of the World Bank, in 1999, “If the wars of this [20th] century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be about water.”
Amidst all this, Blue & Green Tomorrow will be here to report on how sustainable investment has the potential to create a better world and unsustainable investment risks wrecking it.
Just as the first words went to Churchill, so do our last, “Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.”
Blue & Green Tomorrow was two years in the making and today we’re two years old. The simple idea was to write about the connection between investment and the world we live in - without jargon. With our crowdfunding campaign ending at midnight tonight Simon Leadbetter looks back at the four-year ebb and flow of a fledgling publication.
The idea behind B> is a very simple one. Take the sixteen years’ experience I had at the time working in financial services and media, and then combine them with personal values around corporate ethics, environmental and social responsibility and wider thinking of sustainability.
The connection between what we investment in and the world we inhabit seems obvious to many, but there seemed to be very few people out there actively explaining it to the unconvinced
It was only while I was in unspoilt New Zealand in early 2010 that the idea coalesced into the magazine concept that was ultimately launched. ‘They’ told me that launching a new magazine was brave. ‘They’ told me told that I was daft.
‘They’ were mostly right. But this is a story of throwing yourself off the cliff and building the plane on the way down kind of entrepreneurship to quote Reid Hoffman. Here goes.
B> started life as a print magazine with a simply dreadful website attached. Why a print magazine in 2010, I hear you ask? Why, indeed.
My view was that anyone with a laptop can launch a blog or website, in a ‘build it and they will come’ mentality. By publishing a hard copy magazine, we were creating a physical artefact that opened doors and actually landed with a thump. Something tangible often confers a certain credibility – especially in journalism. The printed word still matters.
In addition, preaching to the converted has never been the aim of the game. Encouraging people who already live sustainably to live sustainably is, in a word, pointless. A website with the terms and language we used would mainly attract the already convinced – who would obviously nod sagely at our wise insight as they already agree with us and us with them. A print magazine could be sent to the unconvinced, effectively as a free gift, and perhaps open a dialogue with the lightly sceptical.
Remember, remember the fifth of November
We launched on November 5th, during National Ethical Investment Week 2010. In the lead up to the launch, I had published The Rise of Responsible Investor and was introduced to the overly acronym-laden but ultimately inspiring world of UKSIF, EIA and EIRIS – all of whom were very encouraging and supportive of what I was trying to do.
I had settled on four core areas for editorial, as they balanced the drier topics of investment and energy with the more fashionable world of travel and shopping. During my time in financial services, I have bored myself rigid patiently trying to explain to enthusiastic marketers how excruciatingly mind-numbingly dull and incomprehensible most normal people find financial services.
The original content was very good, but the cost and herculean effort of producing a monthly print magazine nearly killed me and it didn’t reach the number of people with the frequency we needed. The launch team of David Tebbutt, Dominic Kershaw and Lori Heaford soldiered on for five issues before I finally pulled the plug and went back to the drawing board for a rethink.
Despite the support of several ethical financial advisers listed here, Good Energy, Ethical Superstore and Original Travel, this version of B> wasn’t going to be the one that made it.
April 2011 saw the last version of the print edition. It had burnt through my financial reserves at an impressive rate and distracted from the digital version we desperately need to invest in and build.
That said, we had managed to build a better holding website and it was clear that the internet was our future. We could still reach the unconvinced through social media, paid search and the judicious use of opt-in email. Around 750,000 people currently invest in socially responsible investment funds and there are 1.7 million searches per year for ethical, sustainable, green, responsible, socially responsible and impact investing. The problem isn’t one of demand; but supply and information.
In the UK, we have a huge problem with apparent business failure, whereas in the more entrepreneurial US, it’s seen as a necessary rite of passage for any budding entrepreneur. If you haven’t had a business failure in your background, you’re not an investment-worthy candidate.
But I live in the UK and I know this particular psychology well having worked for two companies that tracked fast-growth, innovative companies. The army of ‘told-you-sos’ is always ready and waiting with baited breath to unleash their stream of knowing remarks. I had one phenomenally successful business and one creative success but commercial miss. B> looked like falling into the latter camp.
Early supporters understandably started to drift away, despite my declared intent to relaunch in the autumn. Many gave messages of support and hoped we would be back.
So, we sold up in London, identified a university town with a rising school of journalism and set about rebuilding the business. We took on three interns and a few designers, and redeveloped our website. With me acting as editor-in-chief, traffic rose, feedback became more positive and we started selling again.
And then an investor came calling.
Beware of Greeks bearing gifts
No, not a comment on the current economic crisis in the country but a reference to the Trojan horse that led to the sack of Troy. My potential backer promised funds and the platform to grow B> to new heights, in addition to creating an exciting new way to fund renewable energy projects.
He nearly ruined us.
Over four months we were led a merry dance. Formal documents of intent started to circulate and with a six-figure prize of investment within my grasp, I geared up to deliver what had been agreed. A new editor was recruited, along with a sales manager and more interns, and the burn rate rose again.
The team was humming. Weekly debates on major topics gave everyone the brain food to write better articles, and our content and look got better.
We published the first of our serious guides and the future looked bright.
But pride comes before a fall and I was too hasty it seems. Our potential backer then vanished. Literally. No emails, no phone calls, nothing. The deafening sound of silence.
“To lose one editor is unfortunate, to lose two, careless”
Wasting money is tough but unravelling this fledgling team was the hardest thing.
Walking into the office one day, someone had written on the whiteboard, “This is so sad”. People rapidly left and we went back to the core team of a writer and me, with volunteers ably supporting.
Onwards & upwards
That one writer, our editor Alex Blackburne (a hero amongst men), and I then did something rather special. With nothing and no-one around, we retrenched and launched our three best reports so far, on energy, banking and investment.
We’re preparing two more on shopping and the media before Christmas. Our traffic is higher than it’s ever been and people are subscribing to our newsletter at a rate of knots.
At times, I feel like the King of Swamp Castle from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. For those not familiar with the film, he was a tenacious fellow, “When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England.”
B> will be here in 2013, to see our fourth National Ethical Investment Week. If you can help us get two more reports out in 2012 at http://www.sponsume.com/project/blue-green-tomorrow we will be in a good position for the New Year.
One quote that has resonated over the years, and applies to all of those who sail the entrepreneurial seas, has been Teddy Roosevelt’s 1910 speech at the Sorbonne in Paris, "It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."
Blue & Green Tomorrow is one such a worthy cause and your support is more appreciated than you will ever know.
With six days to go until our Sponsume campaign ends, we’re exploring tenuous numerical links to the number of days left. This one isn’t overly tenuous, as there are six core ‘untouchables’ in the ethical investment universe. Simon Leadbetter explores the sordid, slaughtering end of investment.
Some see ethical investment as the preserve of a strange, well-meaning, simple folk. These naïve investors reject all forms of enjoyment such as alcohol, smoking, gambling, pornography but also the world of arms production and trade and nuclear power. The ‘sextet of sin’ has all sorts of religious and pious overtones that cloud the debate about why people choose to exclude these industries.
Each of these sections has further reading so you can get more information. Alternatively, donate to our crowdfunding campaign and we’ll do all the background reading and summarise it for you.
Alcohol kills an awful lot of people
Alcohol is not only responsible for 2.5 million deaths a year, which would place it roughly third in the most murderous wars in human history on a deaths per year basis, but it reduces the quality of life of those addicted, as well as the tens of millions of families and thousands of innocent bystanders that are affected by drink driving or drink-related violence.
Very few ethical investors object to responsible drinking, but the drinks industry actively markets its products to the underage and countries with little public health. Walk through any town centre on a Saturday night and see what the healthy returns you’re getting on your portfolio is creating on a high street.
Further reading: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs349/en/index.html
Smoking kills an awful lot more people
Killing 6 million people a year is a pretty impressive haul for the tobacco industry, placing it 2nd in the most murderous wars in human history, snugly between the first and second world wars. And those dead consumers need to be replaced.
What is most appalling about the tobacco industry is that, as public awareness of health issues has grown in the developed world, the companies have actively targeted countries with little or no public health education. Tragically, these countries also do not have the public health system to cope with the health issue smoking creates.
If you invest in tobacco, you’re investing in, and benefitting from, the worst type of free market colonialism.
Further reading: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs349/en/index.html and http://www.tobaccoatlas.org/
Freedom and choice or brainwashing and exploitation
While we respect the arguments about individual freedom and choice that are so often used to defend the first two sectors, we cannot ignore the hundreds of millions spent on advertising these products to young people (if it didn’t work, why would they do it?) and, more despicably, in countries that cannot resist the onslaught of alcohol- and tobacco-related deaths.
On an annual basis these two sectors alone represent more lives lost than the annual deaths during the second world war (6.7 million), more than the extermination camps of the whole war (3.1 million) and more than any natural disaster the world has yet seen.
Heads the gambling industry wins, tails you lose
Gambling can be an enjoyable pastime down at the races or the dogs. Many people (73% of the adult population) enjoy a flutter on the outcome of a race or event.
Once again, to think of gambling as harmless is to ignore its historical links with crime or the insidious techniques that are used to hook people to what can often prove to be a life-destroying habit.
Gambling addiction affects between 250,000 and 507,000 people in the UK, predominantly in lower socio-economic groups, many of whom will have spouses and children.
Further reading: http://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/PDF/British%20Gambling%20Prevalence...
Sex sells, so sell sex
Ethical investors are not prudes, but they do recognise a causal link between the current free-for-all in pornography and human trafficking, sexualisation of children, objectification of women and organised crime.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with filming or watching sex between two or more genuinely consenting adults, unless you hold religious or strict moral beliefs. That said, the links between pornography and organised crime and abuse of women and children are strong.
A UN report from 2009 estimated that 79% of all human trafficking is for sexual exploitation, whereas a UK SOCA report placed the figure at 31%.
When you’re watching pornography, how can you be sure that the people in the film have not been drugged, abused or trafficked or are over the age of consent and are freely consenting? Investing in adult entertainment legitimises the more dubious and violent side of this industry. When does the watcher or investor become the accomplice?
Further reading: http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/global-report-on-traffic... and http://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/criminal-justice/sex-t...
Profits of war
Ever since human’s earliest predecessors picked up something long and hard and clubbed someone over the head with it, there’s been profit in conflict. Not a year has gone by since 1945 that there hasn’t been an armed conflict somewhere in the world. And armed conflicts need arms. Apologists for the arms industry use either the ‘economic benefit’ argument or the ‘weapon doesn’t kill someone, the person does’ argument.
The arms industry does create lots of skilled jobs and is a valuable export industry. The problem is that many of those exports go to regimes that kill, torture or maim their own citizens, engage in wars of aggression or commit acts of genocide. Sometimes they even use the weapons to kill our own soldiers; after all, we have the receipts. Weapons do kill people.
As the technology become more advanced, it becomes easier to kill lots of people remotely. Once you remove direct personal involvement from killing and reduce war to a remote control arcade game, sometimes supported by artificial intelligence, the weapon itself becomes the decision-maker rather than the tool.
Around 526,000 people die violently every year with 55,000 of them losing their lives in conflict. While we live in relatively peaceful times on a global scale, producing more weapons and selling to more countries means violence will rise.
Further reading: http://www.genevadeclaration.org/measurability/global-burden-of-armed-vi... and http://www.caat.org.uk/resources/facts-figures/
Nuclear power is an explosive issue
At one time, nuclear power was seen as a panacea to inexorably rising energy demands. Capturing the power of the atom would free us from fossil fuel dependency. A recurring vision of a nuclear age ended at Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986) and most recently, Fukushima (2011).
While emerging technologies, such as thorium, all make nuclear power look more affordable and safe, there are two inherent risks that no amount of scientific progress will solve.
Nuclear waste lasts forever in human terms, roughly 100,000 years. We need to find storage solutions that will last longer than any other man-made structure and that’s an enormous ask.
The second risk is proliferation. Once you accept civilian nuclear use in one country, it is hard to deny its use in another such as Iran or North Korea. Once a civilian programme is in place, there’s an admittedly huge and complex step to military use, but it’s only a step. And you don’t need weapons-grade radioactive material to create a dirty bomb.
Put simply, why would we pursue a source of power that has such inherent risks from an environmental and geopolitical perspective, when we have a limitless and clean alternative?
Further reading: proliferation http://2001-2009.state.gov/documents/organization/105587.pdf and waste http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/apr/24/nuclear-waste-storage
All’s well that ends well
So, there’s the sextet of sin.
Ethical investors aren’t naïve or unsophisticated. In many ways, they are the most enlightened and engaged investors. They simply do not want to profit from other people’s suffering or more global uncertainty.
Read more at http://blueandgreentomorrow.com/reports/the-guide-to-sustainable-investm... and please support us http://www.sponsume.com/project/blue-green-tomorrow.
Our Sponsume campaign ends. In the final countdown to the campaign deadline on Bonfire night and our two-year anniversary, Simon Leadbetter explores a relevant theme. Today, it’s lucky number seven.
Seven is a natural and prime number, following six and preceding eight. It’s a highly significant and recurring number historically and culturally. Sunday school taught us that it was the period of creation and that there are seven deadly sins (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride), which some have taken as a good recipe for an exceptional Saturday night out.
There are also seven less well-known virtues (chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, kindness, patience and humility) and seven loaves became seven basketfuls of surplus. We could go on.
We will. There are seven chakras, in various eastern traditions. It is the number of heavens and hells in Islamic teaching and the number of vices. There were seven kings and seven emperors over the seven hills of Rome.
There were seven wonders of the ancient world and seven rumoured cities of gold. It’s the number of years of bad luck you get if you break a mirror. It’s the number of seas people tend to sail.
And Snow White knew this number of dwarves. Can you name them all? More importantly, our greatest playwright, William Shakespeare, explored his theory of the seven ages of man in As You Like It – infancy (mewling and puking), childhood (whining), lover (sighing like a furnace), soldier (full of strange oaths), justice (full of wise saws), old age (the lean and slipper’d pantaloon), extreme old age (Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything).
It’s the number of objects in the solar system visible to the naked eye (Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn).
On a more mundane level, it was a pretty awesome film with Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Spacey, exploring the aforementioned deadly sins. It’s shaken but not stirred as James Bond’s secret agency number. There are seven days in a week, but most people seem to like just two. Humanity is pretty heptophile when it comes to numbers.
So, we have seven days left to raise as much money as we can to write and design our reports. Most importantly, we want to send them to as many people as possible to encourage them to invest more sustainably. Twenty-four very generous people have dug deep and backed us and we need just a few more – seven maybe. £10 means we can send our reports to an additional 500 high net-worth investors and maybe, just maybe, start the conversation about sustainable investment.
There are lots of lovely rewards on offer, not least the deep knowledge that you’re doing some good. But, who would not want a limited edition of the award-winning Ben Willers information graphics. These will be worth a small fortune, especially in such limited numbers, in a few years’ time, so giving to the cause will be a smart investment too.
Dig deep at http://www.sponsume.com/project/blue-green-tomorrow
We’re five reports into our ‘Guide to…’ series, which began with the inaugural Guide to Sustainable Investment back in April and continued most recently with a report published to coincide with National Ethical Investment Week.
We’ve got two more coming up in 2012 – The Guide to Ethical Shopping and The Guide to Responsible Media – but here’s a round-up of all the reports we’ve published so far – all of which you can download for absolutely free. These reports are what the money we raise through Sponsume will pay for.
April 2012 – The Guide to Sustainable Investment 2012
The Guide to Sustainable Investment endeavours to take you on a journey of discovery—embarking at ethical origins, travelling through the green and growing fields of sustainable and socially responsible investment and disembarking at a new, enlightened destination.
Standing there, surveying the future with a fresh perspective, it is our hope that you will feel able to make better-informed decisions about where and how your money is invested so that you can proudly say, “I played my part—I balanced the needs of the planet, its people and prosperity. I succeeded”.
Take time to read and digest the wise words of Mike Scott, Penny Shepherd, Sarah Pennells and a host of others; realise that you are not alone and then, better still, realise there are people who have devoted their working lives to help you understand and change the impact of your money on the future.
Click here to visit The Guide to Sustainable Investment 2012 download page.
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May 2012 – The Guide to Sustainable Tourism 2012
The Guide to Sustainable Tourism 2012 aims to open your eyes to a new way of experiencing the many wonders of the world. What we hope you will ask yourself after reading it is: how can I reduce my impact and ensure my holiday actually benefits others?
It is totally unacceptable that the time we enjoy so much should be to the detriment of the environment and the people in the places we visit. And we believe that most of us would not enjoy our holiday if we realised that was the case.
Sustainable tourism is on the right pathway to becoming the only kind of tourism. It is starting to feature in the mainstream media and we feel confident that the excellent work being done by so many in the industry will continue to ripple outwards.
Click here to visit The Guide to Sustainable Tourism 2012 download page.
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July 2012 – The Guide to Limitless Clean Energy 2012
Inside our Guide to Limitless Clean Energy, you’ll find everything you need to know about one of the world’s most stimulating and fastest-growing industries, directly from the mouths of some of its leading lights.
We cover the whole landscape: the (former) minister, the supplier, the developer, the investor, the trade body, and of course, the customer. All of which ought to inspire you to make the switch to, invest in or simply support the renewable energy sector.
The reaction that we hope radiates out of our Guide to Limitless Clean Energy is one of amazement and wonder, through the incredible stories of some incredible people and companies. Before long, an increased adoption of renewable energy will seem obvious, necessary and exciting.
Read our guide and be inspired to make a difference.
Click here to visit The Guide to Limitless Clean Energy 2012 download page.
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October 2012 – The Guide to Sustainable Banking 2012
The Guide to Sustainable Banking is a rundown of the best, ethical, sustainable and responsible banking options in the UK, containing inspirational interviews with the leaders of the biggest names in this vibrant sector.
Scandal after scandal in the mainstream banking world is, quite simply, not good enough. We have set out to present you with just a few of the better choices for your savings and day-to-day banking. With the five major banking groups controlling 85% of personal current accounts in the UK, there has to be an alternative.
We are genuinely confident that if presented with a sensible, balanced argument for the sustainable banking options – which the interviewees in our Guide deliver eloquently and powerfully – people will do the right thing and move away from those banks that have done so much harm to our society and planet.
So we really hope you enjoy our Guide. Who you bank with probably seems like a minor decision, but it might be one of the most game-changing things you’ve ever done.
Click here to visit The Guide to Sustainable Banking 2012 download page.
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October 2012 – The Guide to Sustainable Investment 2012 (NEIW edition)
The second Guide to Sustainable Investment was written and published especially to coincide with National Ethical Investment Week (NEIW) 2012.
Now into its fifth year, the event serves as a focal point for proponents of this enlightened investment sector, and we’re genuinely delighted to have had a chance to do our bit in making a difference.
We managed to secure some of the sustainable investment sector’s biggest names, including James Gifford, Penny Shepherd and Raj Thamotheram, and it’s their inspirational words that we hope will encourage you to invest sustainably.
We urge you to open your mind and join the sustainable investment movement early. It’s a journey of discovery with infinite tickets available; but the best seats, as always, are at the front.
Click here to visit The Guide to Sustainable Investment 2012 (NEIW edition) download page.
Arctic summer ice cover reaches its lowest extent since records began. Antarctic land ice is being lost and those losses are accelerating. Forest cover has fallen from over half of the world’s land to under a third. Four-fifths of global fisheries are fully to over-exploited, depleted or in a state of collapse.
Our planet and life on it is evolving, complex and interconnected.
Everything really is connected in ways we can barely imagine. The natural feedback systems above are signalling that something is profoundly wrong with our climate specifically and our environment more generally.
If ice caps melt, more of the sun’s heat is absorbed into dark oceans, accelerating global warming. If forests are cut down or burnt, whole species face extinction, carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere and less of this dangerous greenhouse gas is captured, accelerating global warming. Declaring war on sea life with industrial scale fishing and massive waste dumping has led to a collapse in fish stocks and a toxic poisoning of what remains.
Regardless of your views about human caused (anthropogenic) climate change, let’s not forget the billions of tonnes of harmful particulates our fossil-fuelled and energy intensive industries and transportation systems pump into the air, poisoning the air we breathe. That means more cancer, more heart disease, more skin conditions and more asthma, and the effects are always worse for young children and the old.
Everything is connected
For every dollar that changes hands in the real world of goods and services, $26 is traded financially. Currencies, commodities, debt, equities and derivatives are gambled at a dizzying and accelerating pace, often regardless of their real world outcomes for societies and the environment.
And there is always real world outcome. Currency speculation leads to economies collapsing and investment going overseas. Commodity speculation means people starve and prices become volatile. Debt speculation means households, companies and countries can’t meet their bills and fail. And equity speculation means activities that harm people and the planet but deliver good returns receive investment that could otherwise be channelled into less harmful activities.
Burning dead animals (fossil fuels) is not the answer
As Jeremy Leggett set out in this magazine, “Investors continue to pile into carbon fuels because we allow companies to account coal, oil and gas as assets at zero risk of impairment today.”
Companies that mine or burn fossil fuels or use the energy that they create give the costs of their pollution to the taxpayer. They privatise the benefit for a small group of shareholders in the form of profits and nationalise the increasing harm from cancer, heart disease and asthma. In addition, they often have less than spotless records on human rights or environmental protection as profit trumps all other considerations.
Make your money make a difference
Your annuity, pension, ISA, savings account, bond and shareholding, however small or large, is either part of the problem or part of the solution. Without a baseline of investment from these products into companies, there is little for the City to gamble with.
Everything is connected. We can either individually and collectively create a sustainable future by investing in companies that minimise their negative impact on society and the environment or we can choose not to.
Blue & Green Tomorrow is crowdfunding the production and distribution of three reports to persuade 100,000 investors to invest and consume more sustainably. Please invest in us if you can.
Readers of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (H2G2 to the aficionados) will know the significance of 42. When the super computer Deep Thought is asked what the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is, it answers after 7.5m years, ‘42’. Deep Thought’s creators sheepishly realise that they don’t know the question.
Today, 42 comes into sharp focus for Blue & Green Tomorrow. That is how many days we have left to reach our ambitious fundraising target. Over the weekend we published where that money will go and we now have 42 days to get there. Forty-two days or six weeks if you prefer to think in weeks. That means we have 1,008 hours, 60,480 minutes, or just over 3.6m seconds to raise £24,000. Less by the time you’re reading this. That’s £570 per day or more by the time you’re reading this. In the words of the eponymous H2G2, “Don’t panic!”
At Blue & Green Tomorrow, we’re indebted to Douglas Adams for writing H2G2, in which he describes Earth as “an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet.” That’s where the magazine’s title comes from. It’s also why we’ve never been fans of the land-centric ‘green’ movement on our predominantly blue planet.
Insignificant? Splutters of indignation
In 1990, Carl Sagan asked NASA to turn the spacecraft Voyager 1 around to take a photograph of Earth from a record distance of 6 billion km (3.7 billion miles). Earth was seen as a tiny dot against the vastness of space. In Sagan’s book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, he related his thoughts on a deeper meaning of the photograph:
“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilisation, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar”, every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
We couldn’t put it better ourselves. Nor would we even try.
Everything we love, everything we own, consume and invest in, is on that pale blue dot. Small isn’t it.
“That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”
Unless we radically adjust our behaviour and question the sustainability of our every action, we are going to leave that pale blue dot in a very sorry state for future generations.
Help us change the debate at http://www.sponsume.com/project/blue-green-tomorrow
There really is no plan(et) B.
£25,000. It seems quite a lot of money. And it is a lot of money, by most people’s standards. Why are we looking for this amount of cash?
One of the challenges for the sustainable investment sector is the risk it ends up preaching to the already converted, which doesn’t really make the difference to the investment landscape that we need.
Sustainable investors know they should be investing in a way that balances the needs of the planet, its people and personal profit.
Investors can do it because of ethical concerns. Some investors believe that it is the socially responsible thing to do. Some investors have a desire to make a positive impact or avoid making a negative one. Other investors simply invest sustainably because they recognise a damn good investment opportunity when they see one and want to get in early – as with cleantech and renewables.
Over 8,000 of these admirable investors read us already. And we are grateful to each and everyone. But there lies the problem. If we’re preaching to the converted, we’re participating in a type of confirmation bias, albeit a positive one, where people seek out evidence that supports their worldview.
We’ve written about filter bubbles before and it’s already a major factor in climate change scepticism. Once you’ve started reading only those who agree with you, and then cherry-pick the evidence that supports your prejudice, you’re probably not getting an accurate picture of the evidence.
We need to reach well beyond the converted to make the difference to investment that we need. By methodically and reasonably setting out the case for sustainable behaviour, we may effect some change, but only if that message is read by those who have not yet started on that particular lifestyle.
If we just reach one person with a portfolio of £1m and encourage them to move it to more sustainable options, £25,000 will have a made a big return on investment.
And reaching people costs money. Those who know me know that, for my sins, I’m a marketer. We want to create three reports that will be read and reach enough people will cost £25,000.
We could advertise in the newspapers and magazines read by investors. Or, as it is 2012, we could distribute the Guides widely online and, more importantly, email the unconverted a well-written, fair, optimistic and responsible analysis of the issue. Full of facts and simple steps that set out our case clearly, without lecturing or preaching. Giving this to them for free, with no strings attached, means they may just give us the time and read what we have to say.
We work with some of the best opt-in data providers in the UK as no one likes a spammer. But increasingly desperate times need more desperate measures. As the Arctic melt has so clearly shown, these are desperate times. Adopting a ‘build it and they will come’ approach may have worked for Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, but they may arrive too late for us and our blue-green planet.
Everyday we see more evidence that sustainable funds are not being promoted. This seems to be due to concerns about investor appetite, which own research shows to be massively under-served. The second concern is that by badging some funds as sustainable, it by default makes the other funds look unsustainable. If they want to keep the funds quiet, we want to tell the world about them.
The last few times we have used this approach, over 30% of those we sent the emails to read them. More than 10% of those clicked through. That might not seem like a lot of people, but that meant 3,000 people with more than £500m to invest read about sustainable investment, 3,000 travellers read about sustainable tourism and 3,000 households looked at clean and limitless energy options.
This time we also want to target politicians, charities (who should know better) and local communities. We need a major step change in sustainable investment and consumption. We can do this with your help.
We have access to the data and we need your help to build the right product and right message and send that message to the right people.
