Working in Public Affairs in Brussels, I cannot resist writing my first blog on what one of the EU Institutions is doing in the sustainability sphere. This is a hot topic in Brussels, let’s see how the rest of the world react.

In 2005, the European Parliament (the body representing the 492 million EU citizens) passed a bill calling for reductions in Greenhouse gas emissions of 30% by 2020.The predictable question from us is “what is the House actually doing to save energy and set a good example to the other Institutions and EU citizens?”.

In terms of hard facts, the Parliament currently employs more than 5000 civil servants in its three workplaces in Brussels, Strasbourg and Luxembourg. It occupies more than 900,000m² of office space and uses over 800 tons of paper each year. On top of that, its annual electricity bill comes to around 6 million euros.

In order to counterbalance all this, the Parliament has outlined several initiatives to make savings including through reducing paper consumption and energy use, by sorting waste material and by using videoconferencing as a way of cutting down on travel. It has also established an environmental management system called EMAS (more demanding that the international ISO 14001 standard).

However, in my opinion, the biggest obstacle for the EP remains: the monthly decamping of the EP from Brussels to Strasbourg for its plenary meetings. Yes, whole offices are relocated by lorries and the staff often by road or plane from Brussels to Strasbourg one week in four. Climate Care (green research organization), has estimated that the carbon footprint of holding the plenary sessions in Strasbourg amounts to 190,000 tonnes annually (to put this into perspective the total CO2 2006 emissions for FH Europe was 881 t/CO2). Allow me a small digression, the cost of this two seat system costs a staggering 200 euro million a year.

After strong pressure by some MEP, in June this year the EP has commissioned a study into its carbon footprint “with a view to reducing them significantly”. The results of the study is expected by March 2008.

So, is there light at the end of this smoggy tunnel? I don’t think so. The Treaty says that “EU Member States have exclusive competence for determining the seat of the Union institutions by common accord of their governments”. This means that the EP, the Commission and the Council have no power in this area. Will France ever abandon the seat which brings so much money into the city?  We shall see…

Teresa Calvano

I’m a devoted reader of BusinessWeek and have been a subscriber for at least half a dozen years. I often read each issue cover to cover, so it was with great interest that I read this week’s cover story, “Little Green Lies.”  If you haven’t seen the story yet, it’s a must read for anyone involved in sustainability communications. Unfortunately, it’s not the kind of piece that will leave you with a very good impression of BusinessWeek.

I’m not sure if this is a new editorial direction for the venerable weekly business magazine or not, but “Little Green Lies” is a cynical, caustic broadside against the concept of corporate environmental and sustainability programs. It’s an agenda in search of facts to support it. The reporter clearly had a point of view going in to the story and found a willing subject in Auden Schendler of the Aspen Skiing Company to make his point for him.

That point of the article is that it’s hard to be “green,” and many corporate efforts to do so often fall flat because actually making changes that will make a difference costs too much money and don’t always result in the investment that is promised at the outset. While I believe the examples cited in the article to be true, I think it misses the broader point that there are many things corporations can do that actually have a measurable, positive impact on environmental protection.

My colleague Malin Jennings pointed out in an email to me and other colleagues last week that corporate examples of this fact abound and include: Interface Flooring, Patagonia, the NFL, Staples, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Marks & Spencer, Tesco, Virgin Group, John Deere, Caterpillar, ABN-Ambro, Swiss-Re, Dagoba Chocolate, Walgreens, Abbott, Motorola, ConocoPhillips, Shell, BP, UPS, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Anheuser Busch, and AIG.

While the article nibbles around the edges on that front, it seems bent on making the point that "green = bad/expensive/not worth it." Frankly, after reading the other recent stories this reporter has written, I think there is a broader anti-green, cynical agenda that the reporter is trying to push via his role as a BusinessWeek reporter. In the past, the magazine has saved that kind of editorializing for its very interesting columns. It’s a shame that they’ve now apparently allowed that kind of pointed opinion to appear in what is supposed to be objective reporting. I found the whole piece pretty distasteful from that perspective.

What remains to be seen is what impact this story will have on the broader media landscape and on the corporations already engaged in – or thinking about – the sustainability community. While I think Malin is right when she says that this story may herald a wave of similar negative views about responsible corporate environmental policies, I hope that those stories do not mean an end to the growing number of companies that have begun to see both the forest and the trees. There’s a lot that can be done, and focusing on negative naysayers does nothing to help advance the responsible environmental agenda that every company should now be pursuing.

When I was a kid and my naval officer father went to sea for a year at a time, my mother could have taken all five of us kids and lived in military housing or a ranch-style home in the suburbs.  But she grew up on a small dairy farm in Vermont and hated the noisy, hot and crowded streets of the nation’s capitol and its suburbs.  So she traded comfort for serenity and bought a 150-year old, two room log cabin in the mountains of Virginia.  That was my home, off and on, until I went to college.

Our cabin had no running water.  Instead, our water — for cooking, washing and drinking — came from a spring, one that never went dry, even in the worst droughts.  To this day, 45 years later, I’ve never tasted water so satisfying – and as odd as it may sound, so wet — as the still-cold spring water swallowed by the dipperful.  Once my brothers and sisters and I reached the age of six, we were expected to fill two, ten-gallon milk cans with water each morning and lug them back up the hill to the shade of the cabin’s porch.  I don’t know how much ten gallons of spring water weighs.  I do know that it was heavy enough to force me — panting — to set down the metal cans and give my arms a rest three times between the spring and the cabin. 

I’m telling this story because it occurred to me recently how stark the contrast is between my life today and my childhood on the edge of Appalachia.  As a child, I bathed in a swimming hole in a nearby stream. Today, my step-daughter plays at water parks containing hundreds of thousands of gallons of chlorinated water that fill artificial rivers, wave pools and water slides. 

As a child, my brothers, sisters and I slept on mattresses on the floor of the cabin’s loft and listened to the rain tap rhythms on the tin roof over our heads.   Today, in a three story house insulated against heat, cold and noise, I learn about rain storms by watching TV weather reports. 

As a child, when we got ice cream as a special treat once or twice a year, our flavor choices were vanilla and chocolate.  Today, the only thing that separates me 24/7 from dozens of flavor choices is the glass door of a freezer case at the supermarket.

Yet as different as my life is today from my childhood, there’s one important similarity.  Everything comes with a price. The price of the cold spring water I drank as a kid was the sweat it took to carry two ten-gallon cans up the hill.  Today, the price of the luxuries in my life — from Double Chunk Chip Mint Cherry Swirl Fudge ice cream to weather bulletins on our 34 inch, flat screen, digital tv with 230-channel cable service — comes in two forms, money and the carbon dioxide it takes to produce all this stuff. As a child, if the term “carbon footprint” had existed, mine would have been microscopic.  Today, my family is responsible for as much carbon dioxide in one day as an urban Chinese family produces in two weeks.

As a kid, I never felt poor or deprived.  But these days, inspite of owning so much, I want more — more vacations, antiques, food and of course, more shoes.  I want better, newer, trendier.  I want more of everything — except water.

I guess the reason I don’t hanker for more water is that it’s generally sold in plastic bottles in refrigerated cases.  It costs at least a dollar a bottle and god knows how much carbon dioxide it takes to make the bottles and caps, fill them with water, label them, distribute them, keep them cold and market them. The irony is that none of this carbon-intensive, branded, bottled water tastes as good as the spring water of my childhood – water that was carbon-free and cost nothing but perspiration.