Monday 2 March 2009

Recession good for company environmentalism?

There's been a lot of debates in woolly green-corporate circles about whether recession spells the end for ideas like 'corporate social responsibility,' predicting that CSR will be abandoned as a luxury as companies strip down to the bare essentials of survival.
This press release from threatened van manufacturer LDV puts an interesting spin on this, however. The implication here is that the possibility of going under is spurring moves towards green-tech specialisation. Of course, this has its limitations - electric vehicles are great at reducing the city-centre emissions such as NOX and particulates which knacker our lungs and immediate environments. But if they're charged up on conventional leccy they are no better than ordinary cars, because that electricity still has to be generated, and largely from fossil fuels. But perhaps it would be a positive development if there was some proper joined-up thinking by owners of such vehicles and they were also demanding decent green electricity tariffs from which to charge their cars and vans?

1 comment:

Sarah Irving said...

Comment received by email:

There is an additional dimension to electric cars in addition to the points made here. This is sourcing lithium for the batteries. It is covered in detail in the current edition of The Ecologist (March 2009) by Adam Vaughan in Our electric friends? pp18-21.
See http://www.theecologist.org/pages/archive_detail.asp?content_id=2127&j=y