The dawn of the carbon police

WPP, the global engineering consultancy, has been trialling a new scheme to get employees to cut their personal carbon footprints (The Times). As part of this mini cap and trade scheme employees are given a personal emissions target - fines are handed out for every kg of CO2 emitted over the limit and, similarly, if they reduce their footprint they are rewarded.
The 'policing' of personal carbon footprints is the opposite of our approach to incentivising employees to reduce their footprints. Our programmes aim to engage, motivate and enable employees to make changes, in other words, the focus is on empowerment rather than force! This does not lessen the results and in the long term, the shcemes are likely to be more successful.
We also strive to avoid cultivating the 'offsetting' attitude, whereby employees make a change in one area of their life but fail to think about the environmental impacts of other actions. You have to feel sorry for the Managing Director of WPP, Stuart McLachlan, who cycled from Richmond to the City everyday but still got fined for his flight to South Africa. Should have opted for a 'staycation' Stuart!

What is feminism?

Last weekend a Butler in the Buff came to my flat, hen do of course. Today my mum viewed the photos on facebook (yes my mum’s on facebook). She sent me the following email in response “Feminism was supposed to make men and women equal in a good way - not to allow men and women both to wear lots of make up and pay others to appear semi-naked!”

This captured what seems to be a topic on the moment. Somewhere along the way feminism went wrong and the general consensus is that the young women of today don’t get it. The perceived liberation that we believe we have is overshadowing sexism, exploitation and inequality. Ouch.

Sure a few of you have read this article. My mum agrees with every word of it, I’m not so sure. Yes feminism needs to wake up but it also needs a bit of a rebrand. A PR campaign maybe to let young women know its not radical movement that rejects waxing but…I'm not entirely sure what. The need for women to remember to value themselves and strive for an equal standing maybe. A position that unfortunately we’ve not quite reached. But mum - it doesn't mean we can't enjoy our girly nights out and the latest GHDs in the mean time.

Power to the people

This is probably old news to many of you due to the speed the campaign seems to be moving, but the 10:10 campaign in the UK is showing just how powerful the internet and a simple idea can be. All too often the climate change debate gets lost in numbers, goals, targets and commitments. Here we have one simple idea: that by working together we can achieve a 10% cut in the UK’s carbon emissions in 2010. So much so that only a few days after launch they have already got all three main political parties to sign up!

Is this the best and most engaging climate change movement? Will you be signing up?