The Red Planet Blog

Only "fairly" ethical?

While filming in a bank in the city last week, I happened upon a Cafe Joe vending machine offering "premium drinks, ethically traded".  Yeah, yeah, I'm sure...

Anyway, what caught my eye was a particularly poor piece of typography and design.  Check out the picture here and see if you made the same mistake that I made - "Fairly ethically traded".  "Fairly ethical"?!  What does that mean?  Do they only rip off the coffee growers a little bit, or do they only rip off every second farmer in Ethiopia?

Of course, taking a closer look, the logo actually says, "Fairly and ethically traded", which isn't so bad.  But, did no-one else in the client/designer/manufacturer chain notice what I and every single person I've shown this to noticed?

Stu ;-)

The reporting of "Green"

Boeing are unveiling their new 787 "Dreamliner" long-haul jet on Sunday.  Their PR machine is doing its best to laud it as an environmentally-friendly aircraft.  Apparently it burns 27% less fuel than its equivalent aircraft - for example an Airbus A340.

Excuse me.  An environmentally friendly aircraft?  Why do we allow corporations to say the words "environmentally-friendly" and "aircraft" in the same sentence without shooting them down?

Linked to the "story" of the Dreamliner launch on BBC Online was a "story" from April of Virgin Airways ordering 15 of the Boeing planes.  The headline was "Virgin orders 'green' Boeing jets".  For supposedly the greatest news organisation in the world, that surely ranks up there with the most ludicrous oxymororonic headlines ever published.

On a round trip from New York to London, according to the calculations of the Edinburgh Center for Carbon Management in Scotland, a Boeing 747 spews out about 440 tons of carbon dioxide every time I fly to New York.  If I knock off a quarter of that, by what stretch of the imagination is that "green".  Just because Boeing and Virgin's PR companies kid themselves that their aircraft are fueled by water and oxygen comes out of the exhaust, it doesn't mean that's true.

I'm getting bored saying this every week - the BBC really must stop their journalists writing up stories by copying and pasting from PR handouts.

Stu

Airline Environment Madness

The news is buzzing today with talk of the British Mediterranean Airways "ghost flights" from London Heathrow to Cardiff.  The Sunday Times yesterday revealed that the airline, a British Airways franchise, has been flying two empty Airbus flights per day since October last year in order to keep the Heathrow landing slots they would have otherwise lost when their service to Tashkent in Uzbekistan was cancelled.  In doing so, each trip has pumped 5.21 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Landing slots at Heathrow are highly sought after and are known to be worth up to £10 million.  The landing slot policy, in which 80% of its allocation must be used in a six month period is known as "Use it or Lose it".  Only short-terms exemptions are permitted.

I thought of Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy when reading this:

Arthur Dent's home is about to be knocked over by a bulldozer.  His alien friend Ford Prefect needs to take Arthur down the pub to tell him that the World is about to end, but Arthur is lying in front of the bulldozer...

BUILDER: Has Mr. Dent come to his senses yet?

FORD: Can we for the moment assume that he hasn’t?

BUILDER: (sighs) Well, then?

FORD: And can we also assume that he’s going to be staying here all day?

BUILDER: So?

FORD: So all your men are going to be standing around all day, doing nothing.

BUILDER: Could be.

FORD: Well, if you’re resigned to doing that anyway, you don’t actually need him to lie here all the time, do you?

BUILDER: What?

FORD: (patiently) You don’t actually need him here.

BUILDER: (considering) Well, no, not as such.… Not exactly need.…

FORD: So, if you would just like to take it that he’s actually here, then he and I could slip off down to the pub for half an hour. How does that sound?

BUILDER: (going along with it) That sounds reasonable.…

FORD: And no sneaky knocking down Mr. Dent’s house while he’s away, all right?

BUILDER: (deviously) The thought hadn’t even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of crossing my mind!

Could British Mediterranean Airways and Heathrow Airport not have come to a similar arrangement?

Stu ;-)

Passing on the environmental cost of air travel

As I've discussed before, I'm a big air traveller.  Until I decided to become Carbon Neutral, I'd always stressed about how I'm contributing to Global Warming.  I know I'm not unique here but what can the average traveller do, frequent or infrequent, who share these concerns?

Millions of people book flights online these days, particularly on the budget carriers like easyJet and RyanAir.  When booking flights online, we're used to the additional costs that get added such as additional baggage, as well as the other optional services like insurance, car hire and hotel rooms.  So, why can't another item be added - CO2 offset.  This optional cost would be very easy to calculate and per individual would be very small - at best 1% of the flight cost.

By making this fee optional, no-one could complain about it, it would have an obvious environmental benefit, and it would ease a lot of guilt! Oh yes, and it will make the transition to an inevitable mandatory tax easier...

Here's why it won't happen, though: airlines would be in-effect acknowledging the link between CO2 emission and Global Warming.  And that won't happen for a long time.  Shame that the clever people who advertise airlines couldn't be tasked with finding a clever way to overcome this...

Stu