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You Have to Pay the Piper to ‘Save the Earth™’
If only Kermit truly knew how "isn’t easy" it is.
Honda Motor Co. is at the receiving end of a lawsuit filed by the Save the Earth Foundation, a tiny nonprofit group that apparently holds a trademark to the phrase “save the earth.” The suit, filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, resulted from a Honda Civic commercial in which an actor wears a T-shirt that says “Save the Earth.”
Who knew that those three words were owned by someone you've never heard of? The nonprofit, founded in 1989 and based around Palm Springs, California, provides funding to academics working on environmental issues. As the group’s founder, Neal Pargman, explains, “In 1988, after 16 years of working with 'earth' art and the vital message of 'Save The Earth,' the funds to establish the environmental research foundation that I had always envisioned were finally available."
Twenty-one years later, in filing the lawsuit to protect his "vital message," Pargman said, "The Honda ad campaign confused people into thinking that we endorsed Honda or were affiliated with Honda. We aren't affiliated with them and don't endorse them."
According to its website, Save the Earth has donated “over $500,000” since its founding — roughly $23,000 annually on average. Its “sponsors” seem to include several entities that have licensing deals with the group, which may be the lawsuit’s ulterior motive. Indeed, early in 2009, Save the Earth signed an exclusive agreement with Synergy Licensing, “to represent the Save the Earth logo and trademarks across all product categories and retail sectors.”
Is this any way to run an environmental movement?
I’m of two minds about this whole affair. On the one hand, the ability for anyone to own the rights to those three words seems dispicable, a grave miscarriage of trademark applications — that is, the group should never have been granted ownership. It received the trademark as recently as 2001, according to news reports, meaning that it was granted well after the term was in common usage. A simple Google search of those three words (contained within quotes) yields a whopping 1,540,000 results, at least as of this writing.
On the other hand, I’ve never liked that phrase, which appears all too frequently in ads, press releases, marketing materials, and product labels. It’s not just an overstatement — no product, no matter how widely used, will ever “save the earth” — but it’s downright wrong: The earth isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. It will be around long after we pollute the rivers, level the forests, melt the icebergs, soil the air, and otherwise make the place uninhabitable. It’s us that needs saving. So, maybe this lawsuit will help tamp down that hyperbole.
Still, it’s of concern. If "Save the Earth” can be trademarked, what other common admonitions can be legally bound up and licensed only by permission of the owners: “Clean Your Plate™”? “Wash Your Hands™”? “Call Your Mother™”? "God save the Queen™"?
On Save the Earth’s website, Pargman encourages readers to “Please join me and others like yourself and spread the word ....... ‘Save The Earth.’”
Just don’t use those words.
December 29, 2009 in Green Marketing, State of the Art | Permalink | Comments (2)
Is There Hope for Business after Copenhagen?
I've been trying over the past few days to find some Hopenhagen in Copenhagen — that is, to see some positive outcome to the COP15 climate summit just concluded. The two-week event ended with a whimper, not a bang, a not-altogether-surprising conclusion to an overhyped event in which all parties had anticipating the entire world coming together to solve a single, critical issue affecting — well, the entire world.
When it was all over, the whole exercise — nearly 50,000 official attendees, and probably an equal number of unofficial ones, attending hundreds of events, from formal negotiation sessions to informal scrums of concerned souls conversing around a dinner table — seemed to be for naught, an exercise in futility born of a ideal that disparate parties could find common purpose in jointly solving global problems.
As you likely know by now, the Copenhagen Accord (download - PDF), which the summit ultimately yielded, is a meager statement cobbled together by five countries and "recognized," sometimes begrudgingly, by most but not all of the other 188 national delegations. It contained little that's new or actionable, acknowledging that "climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time," that "deep cuts in global emissions are required according to science," and that "adaptation to the adverse effects of climate change and the potential impacts of response measures is a challenge faced by all countries." It recognized that actions should be taken to keep any temperature increases to below 2°C but contained no legally binding commitments for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. There are some multibillion-dollar financial commitments from developed countries to developing ones, but few specifics about where the money is coming from, or where it will go.
Was it a modest first step, a travesty, or simply a non-event? It's too soon to tell, of course, but pundits — those that aren't still shell-shocked, at least — already are spinning it in these and many other ways.
For companies, Copenhagen seems a setback, a lost opportunity, partly of their own making. As I've previously written, business executives were out in full force, whether speaking on panels, participating on workgroups, or seizing the opportunity to engage in wall-to-wall meetings with various other business folks, government officials, or NGO leaders present in Copenhagen. But business — at least the forward-thinking companies that have been pressing for more certainty about future carbon constraints and pricing — were not adequately represented at the negotiating table.
Some of this had to do with the fact that COP15 was a meeting of governments, each with their own issues about their economies, development needs, and energy and natural resource supplies. (Companies were represented only through business groups that were designated as nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, and had the same status as activist groups and other nonprofits.) The interests of business seemed ill-represented in the negotiations, despite the fact that in most capitalist economies, companies are responsible for most of the emissions.
But it's much more complicated than that. During my brief stay in Copenhagen last week, I got a glimpse of the complexities and seemingly intractable issues the negotiators faced. For example, Brazil and Saudi Arabia feuded over whether and how to value their respective interests: avoided deforestation for the former and carbon capture and storage for the latter. Russia for a time held things hostage, negotiating to hold on to its massive store of carbon credits — one of the few positive things to result from its economic meltdown, since an idle economy tends to be a less-polluting one — past 2012, threatening to dump them all on the market at once if it didn't get its way, creating a glut that would lower their price to virtually nothing, potentially crashing world carbon trading markets. I'm sure there were many more of these governmental hissy-fits; much of it was beyond my knowledge or comprehension.
With all of these games being played, how could the bottom-line interests of business possibly compete?
The true business consequences of Copenhagen's COP-out will reveal themselves in the weeks and months ahead, as companies consider what, if anything, the summit's inaction means to their strategies and shareholders. I'll be among those watching closely.
What brings me solace amid all this is when I consider how far companies and technologies have come in recent years despite of any real political leadership on climate change. The Bush-Cheney administration did everything possible to maintain the status quo, even reversing what little climate progress had been made up to then. Yet during those years, the cleantech sector was born, blossoming into the global industry it has become. Renewable energy technology is on the march, growing rapidly in scale and efficiency in all corners of the world. Energy efficiency has become big business, especially in building retrofits, despite the near lack of regulation or energy or carbon price signals. Global companies are measuring, tracking, and reporting their carbon impacts, and an emerging industry of software tools, accounting services, and offsets is there to assist. The automobile industry has pretty much steered itself in the direction of electric vehicles. Even next-gen biofuels are looking viable these days.
Did I mention that I'm trying to find hope in all this?
Of course, all of this would scale much more quickly if the world's governments had risen to the occasion, providing a roadmap for companies to make investments, develop strategies, and innovate.
As a result, key questions loom large in COP15's aftermath: Will Copenhagen's impass stymie the corporate progress made to date? Will it give courage to the incumbent carbon-intensive interests (and their allied think tanks, politicians, and media outlets) that stand to lose in a low-carbon economy? Will companies continue their efforts to curb greenhouse gases? Will their efforts be at a scale and speed insufficient to address the problem at hand?
Is Hopenhagen still possible? I'd welcome your thoughts.
December 20, 2009 in Climate Change, Sustainability | Permalink | Comments (0)
A Night at Hamlet's Castle: Much Ado About . . . What?
Saturday night brought one of the plum events of Copenhagen, at least for the business crowd assembled in this city: a conference held at Kronborg, also known as Hamlet's Castle, in Elsinore, about 50 kilometers from Copenhagen's city centre. The 250 or so well-coiffed business executives who made the trek here did so in large part by the efforts of Danish media magnate Erik Rasmussen, a Michael Bloomberg sort whose business publication, Monday Morning, is the hub of a influential think tank that has placed Rasmussen at the center of the Danish business world.
Rasmussen created the Copenhagen Climate Council, a global collaboration between business and science, the host of tonight's event, cheekily titled To be, or not to be? New leadership for a sustainable economy — a rather ironic title, perhaps, given that this is a moment calling for bold, unequivocal decisiveness from the business community, not Shakespearean dithering.
It's hard not to be drawn to the Bard's quotes while sitting in this storied building, built in the 1420s and considered one of northern Europe's most important Renaissance castles. Will a climate agreement by any other name smell as sweet? Will a departure from business as usual be such sweet sorrow? Is all that glitters here truly green? Okay, I'll stop now. All's well that — oh, never mind.
Where was I?
Saturday night's nearly four-hour program brought an impressive array of speakers, mostly chief executives of companies from around the world: utilities and energy companies, high-tech giants, finance powerhouses, and the odd multinational (Diet Coke, anyone?). It was well orchestrated — brief speeches followed by discussions and audience questions (which were mostly underhand softballs), blissfully devoid of droning monologues and PowerPoint slides. Impressive stories: how China Power has closed hundreds of coal-fired power plants and installed 3,000 gigawatts of clean power, about 15% of its total capacity; how a Danish dairy is creating carbon-neutral milk; how a U.S. utility is reducing emissions at coal-fired power plants in China.
And then dinner, held in King Frederiks II's Wine Cellar in the basement, where the discussion continued to flow.
All good stuff. But if left me with nagging questions: How much are these business leaders being heard amid the cacophony of voices at the Bella Center back in Copenhagen, where the hard work of crafting a climate deal is being done? How much will these companies' leadership roles factor into the delegates' decisionmaking process? Will their corporate commitments and well-intentioned statements about the impact of the climate negotiations alter in any way the outcome?
As I sit here in this storied building, rich with history, inspiration for one of humankind's most famous tales, I continue to vacillate between hope and cynicism — between the inspiring innovation and commitment of a host of the world's biggest companies and their collective vision of a "low-carbon world" — and the fact that these are not the individuals debating our climate future. Inspired as I am by the stories being told here in Kronborg, I recognize that their collective voice is only one of many being expressed in Copenhagen this week.
And many of the important voices didn't make it past the castle's moat. At Hamlet's castle Saturday night, the presence of youth, the Southern Hemisphere, small business, consumers, social entrepreneurs, and those at the bottom of the pyramid were — well, not to be. Each of these brings a critical piece to the puzzle, including their own inspirational stories. Are all of these disparate voices being heard amid the raucous negotiations taking place at the Bella Center? And if so, are they truly being heard, or are the voices talking past one another? That will be a dominant question for the coming week, and the answer will influence all that follows.
For the companies assembled here in Kronborg and throughout Copenhagen, two additional and critical questions remain: In what way will business interests shape the climate negotiations, and how will the outcome of the negotiations themselves shape the future of business?
To be or not to be, indeed.
December 13, 2009 in Climate Change, State of the Art, Sustainability | Permalink | Comments (1)
Copenhagen's Business (As Usual) Day
Friday was dubbed "Business Day" here in Copenhagen — a chance for the corporate community to come together to discuss their considerable role in addressing climate change.
Significantly, business has been all but shut out of the discussions taking place a few kilometers away at the Bella Center, the site of the official UN COP15 negotiations. There, governments from around the world are talking about a slew of critical issues surrounding the commitments the everyone hopes will emerge a week from today from the global community on climate mitigation and adaptation.
Today, Friday, several hundred business leaders from around the world have gathered in for Copenhagen Business Day, convened by the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, a membership group of 200 global companies, and the International Chamber of Commerce, "the voice of world business championing the global economy as a force for economic growth, job creation and prosperity." They were there to have the conversation they weren't able to have in the Bella Center. As Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the COP15 convening organization, put it: "This is an intergovernmental negotiating process and they're working hard to keep business out."
The day began with a challenge from de Boer. "You've been focusing on the wrong issues. You've been focusing on risks and problems. You should be talking about green growth. And most of the groups are talking to themselves. The private sector plays a key role in green growth. But we don't really know what you're selling."
Indeed, what is business selling? De Boer wasn't referring necessarily about specific products, but about ideas and ideals — the kind of world we want to build and which companies hope to operate profitably in the years to com. That question loomed large at this event: Can global business speak with a unified voice on climate? It was an expression made repeatedly throughout the day.
A series of breakouts explored three scenarios — scenarios for 2012, 2020, and 2050. I attended the short-term one: What are the technologies, business models, and lifestyle changes that are realistically available in the next few years?
An intriguing question, though the conversations that took place among the small groups of 10-12 people in our 2012 session quickly devolved into what seemed like the same-old, same-old questions: What's stopping consumers from adopting low-carbon lifestyles? How do you get beyond green being equated to sacrifice? How do consumers know what's really green? How do companies reconcile sustainability their the need for profits and growth? Is there a role for regulation in spurring behavioral change?
And then came the parade of CEOs, who were holding their own roundtable discussion during all this. They were assigned to break into two groups looking back from 2050 — one from the perspective that we'd successfully crossed the bridge to a low-carbon economy, and how we did it; the other from the perspective that we failed to cross the bridge, and what went wrong.
James Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, gave the report-out. Among the CEOs' conclusions: "Business needs to have one voice calling for a government framework and having it in place now, because we need predictability long-term — one voice, government framework now."
It's hard to see how such a unified voice will emerge. The conversation taking place among this high-powered group of global CEOs wasn't that different from that taking place at a lot of the conferences I attend — a hodgepodge of well-formed opinions about what needs to be done, with little consensus on who, actually, will do it: companies, consumers, government, investors, NGOs, and all the rest. Of course, it's everyone's responsibility, which is one of the limits of a business-only conclave: It fails to bring to the table all of the parties needed to solve the problem.
That wasn't the only limitation. I couldn't help but notice the make-up of the room: primarily white male, mostly European and North American. There were a smattering of Asians and Indians in the room, but no Chinese, South American, Indian, or African CEOs, business leaders of countries that comprise the bulk of the world's population — and the lion's share of greenhouse gas emissions.
There was no shortage of earnestness among those present. These are truly committed executives from proactive, if not progressive, companies that seem to understand the climate challenge and the opportunity, and who are hungering for a price on carbon they can use to make predictable business decisions for the foreseeable future.
("A price on carbon," by the way, is a mantra-like phrase that every speaker seems to utter, despite the fact that there is no clear consensus in the room about what that price should be or how it would be implemented — carbon tax, cap and trade, etc. Nonetheless, those four words are received by knowing nods from the audience with each utterance.)
In the end, de Boer pretty much had it right: Most of these good people are talking primarily to themselves. The people who really need to be in the room are conspicuous by their absence.
It was sobering. If this group of fairly homogeneous executives can barely agree upon the nature of the problems and the most effective solutions, how can the bigger, much more diverse and unruly group of country representatives meeting at the Bella Center possibly do so?
December 11, 2009 in Climate Change, Sustainability | Permalink | Comments (1)
Copenhagen Gets Down to Business
To start with the basics: I don't expect this week's United Nations Climate Change Summit, a.k.a. COP15, to produce much from the perspective of global political change. I'm guessing, cynically perhaps, that the two-week event will yield more posturing and pageantry than productive policies.
But that isn't stopping me from making the trek to Copenhagen. I'll be there, albeit relatively briefly, to see how business, especially big business, is engaging with and responding to the proceedings and all that surrounds them. After all, while national governments will be responsible for creating commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the responsibility for implementing them will fall largely to those economic entities that produce the carbon-emitting goods and services — that is, the private sector.
So, what are companies expecting from COP15? To garner a glimpse, I asked my colleague John Davies for help. Davies, whose title is Vice President of GreenBiz Intelligence, heads up the research division of Greener World Media. Part of his charge is the GreenBiz Intelligence Panel, consisting of more than 2,500 professionals who have volunteered to participate in a monthly survey we conduct to learn what the companies are thinking about and doing on a range of issues.
I asked Davies to query a subsection of the panel — nearly 1,000 members, dominated by those in companies with annual revenue in excess of $1 billion — about three questions: whether someone from their company was going to COP15, whether they expected the UN event would have an impact on global climate policy, and whether the proceedings of COP15 "will have an impact on your company."
Surprisingly, to me at least, there was considerable optimism among the 274 panel members that responded. Nearly one in three (28%) said they planned to attend the Copenhagen summit. Seventy percent agreed or strongly agreed that COP15 will have an impact on global climate policy. And slightly more than half (52%) agreed or strongly agreed that the proceedings of COP15 will have an impact on their company; only 17% disagreed or strongly disagreed with this.
You can download a more detailed summary of the survey here (PDF).
Of course, the GreenBiz panel isn't representative of all companies. Its members are those already predisposed to have an interest in environmental issues, and they hail overwhelmingly from the U.S. and other developed nations. Nonetheless, my takeaway is that the private sector seems to have higher expectations of COP15 than I would have imagined (perhaps higher than many of the idealistic nonprofit environmental groups from which I've been hearing), though clearly there remain some very loud business voices that adamantly oppose most policies restricting greenhouse gas emissions.
Indeed, the corporate response to climate change to date has been all over the map — a response that reflects the lack of political leadership in the United States and most other large greenhouse gas emitting nations. It's that cacophony of nationalistic voices that will be the focus of the 190-odd countries gathered in Copenhagen for the next two weeks in an attempt to forge some kind of consensus. Lacking clear, consistent regulatory signals, companies have been left to their own devices to determine what, if anything, they should do to respond to the threat of global warming.
The result, as you well know, has been a hodgepodge of responses: A relative handful of large companies staking out leadership positions, sometimes out of enlightened self-interest, due to measures they've already taken or the products and services they offer that stand to profit in a world where carbon emissions have a monetary price. (The climate deniers and anti-regulatory crowd have taken these companies to task, branding them as hypocrites or worse for deigning to align their political interests with their economic ones; these critics seem to have absolutely no sense of irony for the countless millions (billions?) of dollars spent by the incumbent economic interests — oil and coal companies and other large emitters — to cast doubt on global warming's existence.)
There are companies that view global warming as a moral imperative for which they hold a social responsibility to act. These are companies most often at the front of the pack of social and environmental issues: the Stonyfield Farms, Nikes, Patagonias, and Interfaces, and many of the members of BSR, Ceres, and other progressive business groups.
There are companies who have adopted a no-regrets policy (though they likely don't refer to it as such), taking the stance that even if, as U.S. Senator James Imhofe believes, global warming somehow turns out to be a hoax, that the emissions-reducing investments they have made will still be worthwhile, as they will have improved efficiencies and reduced costs, and done so at an acceptable if not attractive rate of financial return. The fact that these companies may win PR points for doing so — or may actually contribute to reducing global warming — is icing on the cake.
And there's everyone else: the companies that have offset their emissions by purchasing renewable energy credits or other mechanisms, perhaps even claiming to achieve carbon neutrality without necessarily significantly cutting their actual emissions . . . the companies that have incrementally, almost symbolically, reduced their emissions but have taken great efforts to tell the world about it . . . companies that have one great climate story to tell — a single product or brand or facility that has set an admirable example — leaving the rest of the company largely untouched . . . the greenwashers, with their empty "carbon-friendly" marketing claims . . . and, not insignificantly, the clueless and the laggards.
They'll all be in Copenhagen — either in person or via their industry groups or other representatives. From the looks of the unofficial program — the countless dozens of events taking place in and around Copenhagen over the next two weeks that aren't part of the official UN agenda — scores of them will be visible, variously making announcements, speaking on panels, exhibiting at trade shows, or holding endless discussions and coffee klatches.
My visit will coincide with the so-called "business weekend" starting December 11. On Friday, the Geneva-based World Business Council on Sustainable Development will host Copenhagen Business Day, "a day for business leaders to explore, share and project their vision and commitment to implement climate solutions now and for the next four decades." On Saturday and Sunday is the Bright Green Expo, a trade show hosted by the Confederation of Danish Industry (a group that I addressed during my recent speaking tour in Scandinavia). Saturday afternoon and evening will see a CEO-heavy event held at Kronborg, Hamlet's Castle in Elsinore outside Copenhagen, gamely titled To Be or Not to Be? (The event concludes with "a candlelight dinner in King Frederik II's Wine Cellar.") There will be a slew of other business events, from groups like Ceres, the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, and Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy (or BICEP). Plus still more events featuring the likes of Cisco, Dell, General Electric, HP, IBM, Johnson Controls, Microsoft, and pretty much every other high-tech or cleantech company of note.
I'll look forward reporting back on what all of these business voices have to say — whether they're merely talking the talk, or whether COP15 signals an opportunity to shift corporate and governmental policy around the world.
And whether all of this offers a snowball's chance of making a difference in the climate.
Click here to read the full coverage of COP15 from my GreenBiz.com and ClimateBiz.com team, including posts from senior contributor Marc Gunther, me, and dozens of guest contributors from the business world.
December 6, 2009 in Climate Change, State of the Art, Trendwatching | Permalink | Comments (0)
