Enviromedia Social Marketing

The Federal Trade Commission last week charged three companies, including Kmart Corp., Tender Corp. and Dyna-E International, with making false and unsubstantiated claims that their paper products were “biodegradable.” Kmart and Tender agreed to administrative settlements in the cases against them, while the case against Dyna-E will be litigated. The FTC made this announcement in testimony before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, in a hearing titled, “It’s Too Easy Being Green:  Defining Fair Green Marketing Practices.”

While this sounds like a step forward in protecting consumers from greenwashing, other developments at the hearing indicated that the FTC is not on target for enacting new green marketing standards in mid-2009. After an FTC workshop last year, James Kohm, Associate Director of the Enforcement Division in the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, told me the agency would issue new guides for the use of environmental marketing claims (”Green Guides”) around the middle of this year.

Representative Bobby Rush, D-Ill., chairman of the Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce said at Tuesday’s hearing, “More than ever before, the shelves of our supermarkets, hardware, ‘Big Box,’ home improvement, and pet stores are being lined with goods bearing labels touting themselves as ‘natural,’ ‘biodegradable,’ ‘eco- friendly,’ ‘sustainable,’ ‘carbon-neutral,’ ‘recyclable’ and ‘non-toxic,’ just to name a few.” Congressman Rush is also concerned about inauthentic green certification labels, noting, “For a fee, these companies will certify anything as green, affording false comfort to purchasers that the products meet environmental and safety standards.”

Last year, under the FTC’s current review of the 1992 Green Guides, the agency held a series of workshops and plans to study consumers’ understanding of particular claims, such as “sustainable” and “carbon neutral,” which were not common when the FTC last updated its guides. EnviroMedia/Green Canary’s Valerie Davis, Steve Roberts and I participated in the workshops. We had a hunch the Feds would take a long time to act, which is why in January 2008 we created EnviroMedia’s Greenwashing Index, in conjunction with the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communications.

In Mr. Kohm’s Congressional testimony, he stated that the FTC does not set environmental standards or policy, but rather protects consumers from unfair or deceptive practices. According to a report by Reuters, Kohm said the FTC tried to collect feedback from consumers about perception and understanding of green claims, but didn’t receive many comments. “Without this data,” Kohm said, “the Commission would face the difficult choice of either providing guidance that might inadvertently chill otherwise useful green claims or forgoing valuable guidance altogether.” So now, nearly a year and a half later, the agency is well behind schedule and plans to conduct its own study of consumer understanding of green marketing claims. Their analysis of that data won’t be completed until later this year, further delaying the implementation of the new Green Guides. This division of the FTC has undoubtedly been under-resourced and needs more attention.

Reuters wrote, “Depending on how new rules are structured, the changes could also provide a boost for startups that fall on the greener end of the spectrum in these sectors, as well as those working on tools for informing consumers or monitoring and measuring the environmental impact of companies’ operations.”

We have confidence the Obama Administration will eventually deliver the new Green Guides. In the meantime, what’s a consumer to do? According to a January 2009 national study by EnviroMedia and Green Seal, one in three Americans has no idea how to evaluate whether a company’s green claims are true. A growing number of US consumers (17 percent) are doing online research into a company’s green claims.

The bigger question is whether marketers will continue thumbing their noses at authenticity in green advertising, and our global environmental challenges. Our own ad industry doesn’t want regulation, but isn’t stepping up to self-educate and enforce its own code of ethics.

(Note:  This entry was featured on the Environmental Leader Web site today.)

If you’ve spent any time on Facebook, MySpace or any other social network, you’ve seen them:  memes, those strange hybrids of straw polls and unbidden confessions.  “Top 10 Albums,” “10 Things You Should Know About Me,” and so on….

At UNFCCC events in Bali and Poznań, I learned how other countries are making quicker progress tackling sustainability at all levels.  So, here’s our first meme on a relevant topic:  what kind of action I want to see from the Obama Administration as soon as possible (tomorrow would be nice).

Save Energy
1.    Smarter Weatherization: Require weatherization service contractors receiving ARRA funds to train staff on home energy efficiency. Boots on the ground should provide comprehensive efficiency tips to homeowners after they seal the cracks and add insulation.
2.    Pay it forward: Accelerate use of smart meters and power management, but don’t pretend that information alone will reduce consumption. Budget for behavior change plans to make it popular to conserve.
3.    Come together, save energy: Encourage utilities to work with industry to provide businesses and consumers with rebates for purchasing energy efficient equipment.
4.    Reinvigorate recycling: Feds should prioritize byproduct synergy among manufacturers, restore U.S. recycling infrastructure with market development, and maximize federal recycled content procurement standards.

Save Water and Related Energy Use
5.    A hand on the tap: Rapidly expand EPA WaterSense® product certification and consumer branding.
6.    Less thirsty lawns: De-couple federal funding for state and local water infrastructure with increased demand. Reward utilities for reducing water waste from outdoor irrigation.
7.    Create a Water Prize: Just like the “better battery idea,” offer cash incentives for the best breakthrough water-saving technology for agriculture and manufacturing.

Climate Adaptation
8.    The future is now, at least a little: Create a task force for climate adaptation, to help U.S. cities plan and budget for extreme weather, coastal erosion, climate migrations, etc.

Transportation
9.    Don’t buy, share: Boost bicycle and car-sharing programs in every major metropolitan city.

Consumer Protection
10.    Squash greenwashing: FTC should stop stalling on revisions to green marketing standards. Put them out. Enforce them.

Some may believe climate change will be solved with passage of a cap-and-trade bill. It won’t. That said, respond to this meme or list yours in the comments — from the policy initiatives you’ve dreamt up, heard whispers about or seen on a random Web site.

The drive to slow global climate change achieved a major milestone today: passage of a bill to cap greenhouse gas emissions by the US House Energy & Commerce Committee. Less than six months ago, most Washington pundits said such a feat was impossible during the 2009 economic recession.

Tuerff banged his shoe in Poznań, thinking Congress wouldn't address climate in '09.

Heck, I didn’t think it would be possible, and I was there at the UN Climate Change conference in Poznań, Poland last December when the United States reversed years of denial and refusal to set emissions goals.

There is no doubt the train is leaving the station when it comes to cap and trade legislation, changing the way utilities, industry and consumers use natural resources for electricity and gasoline. Governments and businesses that continue to ignore planning for a sustainable future are risking a lot.

Many hurdles remain for this bill to become law of the land, but the news is a tremendous boost to international diplomacy efforts to develop a new global warming treaty in Copenhagen this December.

Just today, before the vote in Congress, EnviroMedia Social Marketing/Green Canary Sustainability Consulting joined a conference call briefing by the US State Department with two dozen business and industry leaders and Jonathon Pershing, Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change. Mr. Pershing said changes in US foreign policy were “scaling up significantly” the political movement among nations involved in the Major Economies Forum, which represents 75 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emitters.

Former Vice President and Alliance for Climate Protection Chairman Al Gore issued a statement on the House vote: “The bill represents a crucial step forward in addressing the global climate crisis, the need for millions of new green jobs to end the recession, and the national security threats that have long been linked to our growing dependence on foreign oil and other fossil fuels. I encourage Congress to further strengthen this excellent legislation during floor consideration and move to pass this bill in both the House and the Senate this year.”

GREEN CANARY WAS THERE: U.S. SETS TONE FOR COPENHAGEN CLIMATE AGREEMENT

by Wendy Reed, Green Canary Consultant

US Climate Envoy Todd Stern with Sen. John Kerry. photo by Kevin Tuerff

(WASHINGTON, D.C.) Last week, representatives from 17 of the world’s major economies gathered in Washington, D.C. for President Obama’s “Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate.” The meeting was the first of three scheduled for the purpose of preparing for December’s Copenhagen gathering, where a climate agreement is slated to be adopted that will take us beyond the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

Green Canary & EnviroMedia attended a reception last week for international
delegates last week at the Kennedy Center, and a briefing this week on the
forum at the U.S. State Department. Jonathan Pershing, Deputy Special Envoy
for Climate Change, shared discussion topics and outcomes from the meeting with a group of approximately 20 climate policy and industry trade
organizations. We met Sen. John Kerry and forum participants from Great
Britain, Mexico and South Korea.

According to Mr. Pershing, several country representatives at the Forum
commented that more was achieved with the United States at this one meeting than at all climate change meetings that came before. This was attributed to a shift from the past of focusing on what the United States didn’t want to do to what it would do. Just yesterday, Mr. Pershing told a group of business leaders via teleconference the has U.S. State Department has submitted to the United Nations an “implementing agreement” for Copenhagen, saying “It’s a story for where we want to go.”

Monday’s Forum was broken into two main topics: transformational technologies and core issues to resolve before the meeting in Copenhagen. First was the discussion on transformational technologies – technologies with the potential to help mitigate the effects of climate change if advanced on a global scale. This discussion proved to be the least contentious at the Forum.

The topic was introduced by U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and was followed by presentations from Australia and India. Australia presented on global carbon capture and storage, a topic popular among the group according to Mr. Pershing. India gave a presentation on the importance of energy efficiency, with a focus on buildings, emphasizing that energy efficiency can produce the biggest outcome for the least investment.

-Technologies Template In Development-
The group came away with universal agreement to put together a technologies “template” that would form the basis of a few options that could be advanced collectively through public-private partnerships, with a goal to significantly reduce CO2 emissions globally. This template is to be prepared and potentially agreed upon prior to Copenhagen, and should consist of a set of fewer than 10 technologies the Forum countries as a whole would be willing to support, work together on and put money toward.

The second Forum topic regarding core issues to be resolved, was to be divided into discussions on “mitigation” and “finance.” The United States, South Africa and Mexico gave presentations on their thematic approaches to mitigation. The U.S. presentation positioned climate change as “real and urgent, requiring significant yearly actions and not small incremental changes.”

The goal of the core issues segment at the Forum was to discuss and come to agreement on both mitigation and finance approaches by the preparatory meeting scheduled for July in Italy. Mitigation, which included the discussion on how to determine individual country CO2 target numbers for the next agreement, consumed 2 ½ hours. This left the finance discussion essentially postponed until the next global economies meeting in June.

Questions about U.S. priorities for financing climate change mitigation were raised by several groups at the briefing. They expressed a desire to see Congress appropriate funds in a way that gives a boost to U.S. industry sectors that could be part of the solution, and encouraged the State Department to develop part of the climate strategy by first taking stock of U.S. industry capabilities and then determining the appropriate matching tactics.

-U.S. Priorities for Climate Change Mitigation -
Mr. Pershing shared that his perception is that Congress’ top 3 priorities for how to appropriate taxpayer dollars for climate change mitigation are:

1. Adaptation efforts for poor countries experiencing the worst effects,

2.Forestry projects to slow the destruction of rain forests, and

3. Technology investments.

He agreed that U.S. companies could benefit from addressing climate change. He also asserted a desire by the U.S. government to do its best to maintain a level playing field internationally for U.S.-based companies and to facilitate the creation of public-private partnerships at home. “We don’t want to disadvantage companies,” he said, “but carbon.”

Characterization of the Forum’s success was cautionary in nature at this week’s briefing. Trust issues are a barrier for the United States in working with the other countries who have been present all along in
international climate talks and agreements. There is concern that the U.S. will not follow through on promises. As a result, many countries are looking to the U.S. to set short-term goals as well as the long-terms goals shared at the meeting – goals that would have to be met within a Presidential term of office, not passed on to the next U.S. leader who could then change the terms. U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern asserted a U.S. goal at the Forum to reduce domestic emissions to 1990
levels by 2020 and to attain an 80% reduction from that by 2050.

Another barrier to success, with the United States joining the talks at this stage of the climate agreement process, is the fact that many of the countries who signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol have already arrived at CO2 reduction target numbers and appear inclined to hold on to their long-term positions. This leaves less room for fresh dialogue on how to determine country-by-country reduction targets, something the United States would like to see happen. Parity and “comparability” in terms of country commitments, among developing and developed countries alike, was a key issue that kept Congress from ratifying the Kyoto Protocol in the past. Based on the briefing, this theme continues to be of utmost importance to U.S.
climate agreement negotiators today.

-U.S. Remains Committed to Copenhagen Deal by December-
According to Mr. Pershing, the United States is committed to achieving an international agreement by the end of the year, and will work overtime to make it happen. “We just need to find a common language with the other countries,” he said. “We each have a different history and should commit to something different, appropriate to our own circumstances.” He added, “I don’t believe that an agreement in Copenhagen will be the end-all-be-all [for the United States to address climate change]. We must marry our
commitment to other efforts in trade and technology, forestry, and more.”

Countries participating in the Major Economies Forum included: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Green Canary Headed to Copenhagen–Subscribe Now for Direct Reports.

Green Canary Principals Kevn Tuerff and Valerie Davis at the MEF reception, Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. April 27, 2009

A team from Green Canary and EnviroMedia have booked their December tickets for COP15 at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. At the UNFCCC in
Bali in 2007, and Poznan, Poland in 2008, Tuerff and Davis wrote daily reports from the conference for several organizations and media outlets,including the U.S. Business Council for Sustainable Development,
EnvironmentalLeader.com and the Austin American Statesman.

Email Green Canary CEO Kevin Tuerff if you’d like to subscribe to our special reports from Copenhagen, or if you’d like a special report for your organization.

Check out the winning video from a national competition among US college and university students, sponsored by Climate Savers Computing Initiative. (CSCI)

The Grand Prize was won by team ArcaneMind, for “Power Down: One computer at a time.” The team wins $5,000 and one HP TouchSmart tx2z laptop for each team member.

The Grand Student Prize was submitted by team Tiger P.R.I.D.E. Connection from Jackson State University. The team wins $5,000 and each team member receives one 2009 Specialized Globe Vienna Deluxe 1 bike powered by Specialized and one license for Microsoft Expression Studio.

EnviroMedia gathered with judges at Google’s headquarters in Mountainview, California last week to view and score the top 20 videos. Judges represented CSCI member companies Fujitsu, Google, HP, Intel, Intuit, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.

The best videos used humor to capture viewer’s attention, but also provided simple tips to reduce the energy consumption used in personal computers. Click here to see more videos and learn more about the Power Down for the Planet campaign from CSCI.

You can help this energy efficiency/pollution prevention movement by forwarding these spots to your friends.

Sen. John Kerry pauses for an iPhone pic with Kevin Tuerff and Valerie Davis

(WASHINGTON DC) Valerie Davis, Millie Salinas and I were honored to attend a U.S. State Department reception at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, in honor of the 17 delegates of Major Economies Forum on Climate and Energy. A highlight was briefly meeting Senator John Kerry.  He spoke about his long fight against global warming, going back to the Rio conference and the Kyoto Protocol.

We spoke with delegates from Mexico, Britain and Korea as well as staff from several Hill staffers. The buzz in the room was that China had delivered to President Obama (& other countries) that day some very significant announcements about their climate change commitments. Haven’t read any details yet.

A summary of what we learned at the event by Valerie Davis, “Senator Kerry: Climate, Energy Challenges Spell Opportunity,” was published April 30 on EnvironmentalLeader.com

We were also able to meet Todd Stern, US Climate Envoy, right after he spoke. It was a quick exchange, but he was pleased to know we had been to the UN Climate Change conferences in Bali and Poznan, and he appreciated our work in advocating for action on climate change.

It was a beautiful evening overlooking the Potomac River from the Kennedy Center terrace.

EnviroMedia’s principals had the opportunity to attend an opening reception Monday night at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. to honor delegates to the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate. The special invitation came from the Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economic Affairs and Todd Stern, the newly appointed U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change.
 
Check back this week for updates from Kevin and Valerie, and here’s a related Reuters article about the U.S. gathering top world leaders together to address climate change.

One minute we’re hearing about sold-out soccer games with empty stadiums in Mexico City, and now just saw on national TV that a school district near San Antonio is closing for a week. As this story unfolded over the weekend, we couldn’t help but be reminded of advice after the first death in Texas due to West Nile Virus several years ago, and classic flu prevention tips: be vigilant, wash hands, cover cough, stay home if sick.

Former US Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich Disputes Climate Change Facts

Below are web links to testimony given at the U.S. Capitol related to the Waxman climate change bill.

Former Vice President Al Gore Testifies on Cap & Trade Bill to Congress (April 24, 2009) courtesy C-SPAN.