Dutch treat
Forget cow-tipping. Dutch pranksters are all about car-tipping these days, dumping dozens of lightweight Smart cars into Amsterdam's canals. What tossers!

Image created by The Sun

Keep on truckin'
Giving the Weinermobile (R.I.P. Oscar) a run for its money, the Truck Farm is a CSA on wheels. Talk about teaching an old Dodge new tricks!

Cloudy with a chance of ice cream
I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream that teaches us about climate change and emerging nanotechnology.

Monkey business
Guard your gardenias, folks, seems guerilla gorilla gardening is on the rise.

Take that, Once-ler!
He is the Lorax; he speaks for the trees. And soon he'll be doing it in animated 3-D.

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Industrialized countries have promised to put more than $6.1 billion in the World Bank's Climate Investment Funds, which aim to boost clean technologies and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in developing countries. On Friday, the United States pledged $2 billion over three years; Britain will chip in $1.47 billion and Japan $1.2 billion, with contributions from Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland making up the rest. Two trust funds will be created under the Climate Investment Fund umbrella: The Clean Technology Fund will invest in projects that "contribute to the demonstration, deployment, and transfer of low-carbon technologies" and "have a significant potential for long-term greenhouse-gas savings"; the Strategic Climate Fund will "serve as an overarching fund for various programs to test innovative approaches to climate change." The World Bank will announce the first beneficiaries of the funds in early 2009.

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Through an osmotic process we don't pretend to understand, the mixing of fresh and salt water at the world's river mouths produces enough energy to feed 20 percent of the world's electricity demand, say Dutch scientists. Could we start running our gadgetry on salt power? Small projects in Norway and the Netherlands are testing out ways to harvest estuary energy, but membranes needed for the process are expensive and energy-intensive to produce, so salt-to-power technology is unlikely to be viable anytime soon. But pass the margaritas anyway.

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What a swell party it was. The first week of October saw a crowd of 1,150 people from 65 countries rubbing shoulders in the Netherlands, including royalty (in the form of HRH the Prince of Orange), politicians (including former Vice President Al Gore and Margot Wallström, VP of the European Commission), titans of industry (like Gerard Kleisterlee, CEO of Royal Philips Electronics, and Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, chair of Anglo American), and the heads of multilateral agencies (among them Achim Steiner, the new United Nations Environment Program executive director). What brought this motley crew together? The launch of "G3," the latest version of the Global Reporting Initiative's Sustainability Reporting Guidelines.

The boy who cried "flood."

Illustration: clipart.com

As we scoop up a fistful of passing canapés, Full Disclosure's authors must swallow hard and admit that we have been deeply involved in the roller-coaster ride of the GRI's development -- and in some aspects of its governance. Through it all, we have remained staunch fans of both the institution and its work. Still, with the G3 launch taking place in below-sea-level Amsterdam (where the GRI secretariat has its headquarters), we found ourselves thinking of that little Dutch boy trying to hold the sea back by putting his finger in a hole in an endangered dike. If memory serves, that story turned out fairly well, but is corporate reporting really making a marked difference in global sustainability efforts in the face of the century's challenges? And -- thanks, we'll take the champagne -- will the G3 accelerate things in a material way?

In some ways, the GRI already has raised the reporting bar. The GRI's vision today is "that reporting on economic, environmental, and social performance by all organizations becomes as routine and comparable as financial reporting." We drink to that. And even with a swimming head, it's clear that the GRI's framework has become the de facto standard for sustainability reporting. This is key, because transparency and disclosure, or so the logic flows, enable stakeholders to hold companies to account -- which in turn drives improved sustainability performance.

But in the near-decade since the GRI was launched as a project of Ceres, have adequate numbers of companies taken up the challenge to "come clean" -- or does the GRI, like that shivering little boy, stand pretty much alone?

As ever, the story has its bright and dark sides. In a world with more than 50,000 multinational corporations, the GRI counts just over 1,700 companies using its guidelines in some way -- and far fewer reporting "in accordance," which requires comprehensive reporting against the GRI's core indicators, plus CEO or board-level sign-off. The GRI's close partner in the reporting world, the U.N. Global Compact -- which accepts GRI reporting as evidence of signatories making progress against their Compact commitments -- claims some 3,000 members, of which around 2,500 are companies. So at best, we're probably looking at 1 percent of globally operating companies currently reporting along GRI lines.

Just prior to the G3 launch, a UNEP-commissioned study of the future of GRI-type reporting suggested that a plateau has been reached. The implication is that corporate reporting might get stuck -- or, worse, shift into reverse as momentum fades. The challenge for the boy with his finger in the leaking sea barrier was how to get the word to others that the dike had a sprung a leak without abandoning his post and letting the sea rush in. For the GRI (and UNEP), the trick may lie in staying at the current post while working out how to help companies shift from CSR strategies to a new focus on scalable, entrepreneurial, and, yes, reportable solutions to sustainability challenges. This is already on the international business agenda, with, for example, "scaling up sustainable solutions," one of the core themes for the ski-slope crowd at next year's World Economic Forum in Davos.

Putting our optimists' hats on, we see considerable progress in reporting -- and huge progress since SustainAbility began its surveys of the field in 1992. Every two years, we publish the Global Reporters benchmark survey, which identifies and assesses best practice in corporate sustainability reporting worldwide. This fall, we've partnered once again with UNEP and Standard & Poor's to produce our seventh benchmark survey, and the fourth focusing on sustainability reporting. While the full results of "Global Reporters 2006" will not be available until November, we have completed most of our research. As in 2004, the best reporters we can find all make some reference to the guidelines, while nearly half report "in accordance." So it is blindingly clear that the GRI has both inspired people to act and shown them how to get started. The survey concludes that, whether or not they directly mention the GRI guidelines, most leading reporters are using them to some degree.

Still more good news is out there: perhaps counter-intuitively, leading global companies are finding value in reporting far more information on their sustainability performance than the GRI currently demands. Far from fretting about a plateau (although this is a clear present and future danger), we think the launch of the G3 guidelines will boost societal interest in the business impacts of sustainability issues like climate risk. In the process, the spotlight will likely move well beyond annual, stand-alone, "in accordance" sustainability reports.

Companies such as Novartis are integrating their sustainability reporting into their annual reports. Whole industries face new requirements for public reporting, such as the pharmaceutical industry requirement for the disclosure of clinical trial data. Investors like those participating in the Carbon Disclosure Project are congregating in greater numbers -- and, now that the CDP community represents over $30 trillion of funds under management, enjoying greater clout in demanding that Global 500 companies disclose critical sustainability performance data.

So, unlike the boy at the dike, who waits through a full day and night before help arrives, the GRI may not be so alone. A new wave of reporting is building, one better linked to and more influential over corporate strategy and which does more to explain (with specific targets and clear performance indicators) where the company is going and how. This wave has the potential to help add and account for value right across the triple bottom line.

Recent reports from companies such as BP, BT, Gap, GE, and Nike are really exciting; all are linking their sustainability reporting more closely to their mainstream business. As an example, consider BP's commitment to invest $5 billion-plus in alternative energy and grow this investment five- to tenfold in the next 10 years. (Yes, yes, we know about BP's current operational challenges, but we have seen instances in the past where such reverses become powerful drivers for future action, and we hope this will be the case here.)

So what comes next? We see the agenda following a number of trajectories. Reporting will be only one component of continuous, customized corporate communication, drawing data from entire value chains, addressing hard issues (e.g., carbon emissions) in quantitative terms, offering more coverage of issues of consequence to emerging economies, and mutating from encyclopedic reports designed to win awards to prospectuses designed to attract investment and other forms of support.

As some parts of the agenda become too important to be left to CSR departments, the spotlight will increasingly shift to board level, to CEOs, CFOs, and the financial markets. Once the party is over, picture CEO, CFO, and COO fingers being thrust into the leaking, trembling stonework. It's sad that this will leave only one hand free for the cocktails. But hey, it takes a (global) village to raise a standard.

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Brits change habits to save gasoline; Americans don't

Starting in 2008, new drivers in Britain will be tested not only on the anxiety-producing three-point turn, but also on their ability to drive in a manner that conserves gasoline. The country hopes to produce a new generation of eco-aware motorists who accelerate and brake smoothly and change gears early to save fuel. Other countries have instituted similar initiatives, like the Netherlands, which estimates that savvy drivers can cut fuel use by nearly a third. It's almost like they take their effect on the environment seriously. Meanwhile, in the U.S., whining about gas prices is still on the rise, but so is demand for gas, as most Americans are still financially able to handle prices at the pump. Economists suggest gas prices would have to be high for several years for people to adjust their gas-guzzling habits -- especially without a drivers' ed teacher nagging them from the passenger seat.

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In most fields of science, lay opinion tends to be more alarmist than scientific opinion, says Carbon Mitigation Initiative codirector Robert Socolow. "But, in the climate case, the experts -- the people who work with the climate models every day, the people who do ice cores -- they are more concerned. They're going out of their way to say, 'Wake up!'" In part three of her magisterial New Yorker series on climate change, Elizabeth Kolbert says those calls are finding a mixed reception. In the Netherlands, a quarter of which is already below sea level, the government is funneling millions into projects to widen rivers, raise dikes, and alert the public. However, in the U.S. -- which is responsible for more than 20 percent of planet-warming carbon-dioxide emissions -- public debate is woefully confused and action woefully inadequate. "It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself," concludes Kolbert, "but that is what we are now in the process of doing."

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Church air may be bad for believers' lungs

Whatever its effects on your soul, spending lots of time in church may be bad for your lungs, according to a new study out of Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Researchers measured air quality in a small chapel and a large basilica and found levels of particulate matter up to 20 times higher than minimal European safety standards. They also found high levels of free radicals -- not apostates or latter-day Luthers, but highly reactive molecules that inflame lung tissue. The Dutch scientists trace the problem to poorly ventilated chapels where candles and incense are burned frequently. They warned priests, choir members, and other saintly types who spend lots of time in church to pay heed to good ventilation. The study is part of a growing body of research on the long-neglected subject of indoor air pollution, which can be more harmful than outdoor air and which is regulated poorly, if at all.

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That smarts! Dutch pranksters go car-tipping, and more

For those in the know, the Netherlands are all but synonymous with responsible urban planning. From mass transit to mass cycling, from sustainable building to species protections, the country has raised the bar for the rest of the world. Now, though, politics in the Netherlands is shifting precipitously to the right -- and many fear that progressive urban planning could fall by the wayside. Low-income, state-subsidized housing once accommodated 70 percent of the populace; it currently houses a mere 30 percent. Meanwhile, increased road development is leading to urban sprawl, shopping centers are springing up along freeways like mushrooms, and American-style living has taken root in parts of the country. Harm Tilman, editor of de Architect magazine, says that the old-style, socially conscious development model is being rewritten, and that, "Land has become a market commodity."

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Confess: You've played more than one hand of solitaire on company time. Tetris anyone? Maybe you've even been a MYSTic or a QUAKEr.

If you happen to work for the Dutch Ministry of the Environment, playing computer games is now part of your job description. Or at least playing a computer game -- the world's only computer game designed to solve the problem of nitrogen pollution. The Netherlands is home to intense agriculture and industry, and is, not coincidentally, one of the world's hot spots for nitrogen pollution.

Nitrogen is a confusing bad guy because it's everywhere -- and often a good guy. You just inhaled a lungful. You ate a bunch for breakfast, then relieved yourself of a bit more. Nitrogen fertilizer radically shaped the course of the 20th century, increasing agricultural output to help feed a growing world population.

The smoggy side of nitrogen oxides.

Photo: NREL.

But then there's nitrogen's dark side: Your car combines it with oxygen to form NOx, a component of smog. Nitrogen pollutes surface waters, and in drinking water, it can cause birth defects. We have substantially changed the flow of nitrogen on Earth, and the natural systems of the planet are responding with acid rain, suffocating air, and a massive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

That's bad news, but it's hardly the kind of arch-villainy that makes for pulse-pounding, swivel-kicking, search-and-destroy arcade action. But that didn't deter the computer programmers. At the Second International Nitrogen Conference, held outside of Washington, D.C., last October, the otherwise technical proceedings were spiced up by the official unveiling of NitroGenius, an environmental computer game commissioned by the Dutch government. The hype was palpable; teen-aged boys with nothing better to do than await the Christmas release of the Nintendo Game Cube and Microsoft's X Box lay siege to the conference.

Okay, that's stretching it. But to give you an idea of how much nitrogen matters to those in the know, the conference was held barely a month after Sept. 11 and was still attended by more than 400 participants from around the world. And if the plane trip wasn't enough of a test of faith, we were convened at a Washington-area U.S. Postal Service facility just as the anthrax scare took off.

NitroGenius was born 18 months earlier and 30,000 feet higher, when Stan Smeulders of the Dutch Environment Ministry and Jan Willem Erisman of the Energy Research Center of the Netherlands were winging their way toward the U.S. to help plan the October conference. The pair had helped convene the first such meeting in Noordwijkerhout, the Netherlands, in 1998, thereby beginning the essential but difficult process of getting people who worry about pig farms and manure retention and people who worry about tailpipes and emissions trading to talk to one another.

Image: Play2Learn.

It was a long flight, and somewhere in the middle of it, Smeulders had his big idea: Let's do something new, he proposed to Erisman, something totally unheard of in nitrogen circles. Smeulders started imagining a game -- a game that would help everyone understand the problems associated with nitrogen and the equally thorny challenges of making policy to address those problems; a game everybody could play, perhaps even by joining through the Internet.

"It was a huge idea, of course," Erisman says. He should know, because it fell to him to implement it. This brings us to the point in the story where many of us proud Americans wish, just for a moment, that we were Dutch. Unfazed by a half-million dollar price tag for a computer game to save the world from nitrogen, the bosses up the political ladder bought in.

Fittingly, playing NitroGenius is a little like sitting at a starship console and deciding the fate of small planets. Only, instead of just pointing and shooting, you have to make myriad decisions, taking into account the potential environmental impact of various business and social decisions. It's a four-person game, with each player representing one sector of the Netherlands: industry, agriculture, government, or society. Each sector can do more or less what it can do in real life: Government can tax, spend, and make policy; society can eat organic and join advocacy groups; agriculture can build green stables or change tillage habits; industry can invest in research and new technology.

Conference attendees playing dirty.

Photo: Play2Learn.

On every turn, each player has a budget and 90 seconds to choose from a series of behavioral options. Graphs show general levels of happiness, employment, and economic health, alongside maps of pollution levels plotted by region. The instruments are recalibrated after every turn.

But beware: Just as you lean in to check your readings, a tomato may hit the screen with a pixilated splat. The first time this happened, we were all startled -- even the society representative who "threw" the tomato by exercising her veto power to nix exploratory drilling in a wetlands.

The game is full of pleasant quirks like that, including fake news articles about the discovery of "celestial backspin" and even the occasional advertisement -- "Drink Spaz!" -- which, when I sat down to play, served to break the ice and get the contestants chatting. From there it was a manure-covered slope to serious gaming. While everybody playing knew something about nitrogen pollution, nobody could go it alone. And nobody seemed to have trouble getting into their roles. "This guy's spreading cow shit all over the place," complained one player. Another, a U.S. EPA administrator, declared, "I want to be a radical environmentalist!"

Despite the giggles, the science is hardcore: NitroGenius incorporates state-of-the-art nitrogen modeling by pollution planners in the Netherlands. "The idea of having a game came from the scientific community, and they were focused on providing the right models," emphasizes Erisman.

But he also got professional game designers involved. "It was a constant struggle between the scientists who wanted to do it right, and the gamers who are not as interested in science. They wanted to play and have fun. What you see here is a compromise."

Some pig.

Take pig high-rises, for example. I nearly fell off my chair when one of my choices was: "Give permission for a high-rise filled with pigs overlooking the Rotterdam harbor with a central manure-treatment facility and windows with tree paintings for animal welfare. Free of charge!" Sounds funny, but it's been suggested, says Erisman. "If you look at an aerial photo of the Netherlands, you see all those pig buildings next to each other. It takes up a huge amount of space. So why not build them [up], and place them near the harbors where all the food is imported, and place them near an electricity facility in order to process the organic waste and get all the energy out of it?"Logical, perhaps. But be warned: Build them and the pigs may come, but you'll take a minus-four image hit.

Erisman won't be jumping to Nintendo, but he does hope to make a single-player version of NitroGenius available for public download soon. And he dreams of virtual reality: "Suppose you could walk through a forest, with the smell, the touch, and the view, and you can change the forest by putting more nitrogen in it. You can see the biodiversity loss. The smell will change. The view will change."

I like the game the way it is, but then, I won. I even have a windmill trivet to prove it. I'm not expecting an offer to play Nitrogen Czar for the Dutch government, but NitroGenius sure beat the usual conference routine of networking, drinking bad coffee, and fighting the hypnotic influences of PowerPoint.

And that, after all, is the point. Says Erisman: "For me, the strength of the game is not the dataset, it's not the models. It's the people who will play it and talk to each other and interact and get an understanding of why someone makes a choice."

After spending a long, frustrating time trying to get people to look at nitrogen pollution in an integrated fashion, Erisman seems to have finally found the right tool for the job. "It's the first time they comprehended and saw the need for getting people together," he laughs. "That's perfect. Two years of lobbying and talking didn't do anything. And a game -- it works."

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Dutch prosecutors are accusing an animal rights activist with the murder on Monday of Pim Fortuyn, a right-wing candidate for prime minister. The suspect, Volkert van der Graaf, opposed factory farming and fur farms and worked for the little-known group Environment-Offensive, which uses legal tactics to advances its cause (rather than the in-your-face, direct-action methods of groups like the Animal Liberation Front). Roger Vleugels, a lawyer for the group, described van der Graaf as normally a "calm, restrained" individual who didn't engage in politics. In his campaign to head the government, Fortuyn made clear that he didn't think much of green issues. He told some environmentalists last year: "Environmental policy in the Netherlands has no more substance. And I'm sick to death of your environmental movement." The news that Fortuyn may have been murdered by an environmentalist has led to a wave of email and telephone threats against mainstream green groups in the country.

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After years of mistrust and fear, Albanians and Serbs are coming together over a common interest: protecting the environment. In a project funded by the Norwegian and Dutch governments, environmental groups in Kosovo are setting up an electronic network to enable the former enemies to share resources and information on protecting the environment. The network, known as Sharri.Net, was created in February, and a website dedicated to the cause should be up and running by June. "It's sort of a success for a multi-ethnic Kosovo," said Blerim Vela of Kosovo's Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe, which is coordinating the program. Ethnic conflict in the region exacerbated environmental problems, including water pollution, deforestation, and heavy urban smog.

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Sony said yesterday that it would replace the peripheral cables for 1.3 million PlayStation 1 consoles destined for sale in Europe, in response to environmental concerns raised by the Dutch government earlier this week. A European Union rule forbids the sale of products that contain more than 0.01 percent cadmium; the Dutch say the cables pose a health threat because they contain between three to 20 times that amount. Sony questioned the Dutch regulators' interpretation of the rule, but said it would replace the cables nonetheless. The company has no plans to replace PlayStation 1 cables outside of Europe.

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Illegal trafficking in wildlife has become Brazil's third-most profitable illegal activity after arms and drugs smuggling, generating up to $1 billion annually. An estimated 38 million wild animals are stolen from the country's forests every year, according to a new report by the National Network Against the Trafficking of Wild Animals (RENCTAS). Eighty-two percent of the illegal sales are birds, while 14 percent are mammals and 3 percent are snakes. The report found that only a tiny fraction of the animals -- about 0.45 percent -- are intercepted by the authorities. Many of the animals are shipped overseas to supply a lucrative international market (which is dominated by the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France), but RENCTAS estimates that only about 10 percent of the animals survive the journey.

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An effort to make Dutch farms friendly to native plants and animals has failed, according to a study published this week in the journal Nature. Fields managed according to an environmental protection agreement were no richer in plant and bird species than those farmed conventionally. David Gibbons, of the U.K.'s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, said he wasn't surprised by the study's conclusion, but added that it was a warning, not a death knell, for green farming: "You have to monitor agri-environment schemes closely and adapt the details to make sure they're working." That's sound advice for the European Union, which is set to double its spending on eco-friendly farming in the near future.

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Bill McKibben reports from The Hague:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Depending on how you spin it, the collapse of the climate negotiations in The Hague, Netherlands, could leave you confident that much progress has been made, despairing that a Bush presidency dooms the future of new talks, or convinced that this is simply a problem too big for human beings to get their heads around.

I think, though, that it really leaves us in pretty much the same position we were in two weeks ago, before the conference began: We're waiting on the weather.

Exhaustive and exhausting negotiations tend to leave all involved with a severe case of tunnel vision. Inside the mammoth meeting hall, everyone came to believe their own hype: that they were on the verge of an agreement that would truly change the way people used energy, and hence kick-start the process of reducing carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere.

When talks collapsed, demonstrators broke apart the sandbag dike they had constructed.

Photo: Courtesy of IISD.

Indeed, the Kyoto treaty did represent a kind of triumph of implacable bureaucratic optimism. At each potential breakdown point, someone came up with yet another fix. After six large-scale conferences, the document resembled one of those late-Ptolemaic maps of the universe, with a bewildering variety of epicycles and adjustments added to somehow make the model comport with the real world. There were Clean Development Mechanisms to allow the rich world to purchase easy credits and to buy off the poor world; there were Hot Air provisions and complicated Baskets of Gases; and there were the Carbon Sinks, also known as trees, designed to make the whole package easy on Americans.

That is, instead of a straightforward plan to wean the world from coal and oil and gas, there was a Rube Goldberg machine that attempted to meet every national interest. And it might, just possibly, have worked -- that is, it might have provided enough incentives to get the energy industry serious about researching and developing alternative technologies, and those technologies might have taken off so spectacularly that they would have provided us energy junkies with the methadone we seem to require.

But in the end -- in the waning hours of Saturday morning -- the Europeans decided they couldn't sell this particular contraption at home. It was simply too easy on the Americans, who, arrogantly, had never really believed anyone would call their bluff. The French did, and shortly thereafter the cleaning crew arrived to cart away the tons of thin carbon sinks known as sheets of paper that rose daily like an ever-higher tide.

Even if the Europeans hadn't stood tough, though, the document wouldn't have made it through the Senate. Not with George W. Bush as president, and not with Al Gore as president (though if Gore had carried Florida, these negotiations would have at least produced an agreement). And the reason is simple: The American public still does not believe with the necessary passion that climate change represents a problem serious enough to require any compromises in our way of life.

One of the ironies of the entire global warming debate is that America -- chief contributor to the problem -- is geographically situated in such a way that it will be one of the last places to feel the pain. With the exception of Florida (take that, Katherine Harris!) and a few other parts of the Gulf Coast, our shorelines are not especially vulnerable, nothing like Bangladesh or the small island states or the Nile Delta. Sure, we've had some floods and hurricanes, but we're a vast and rich land and we recover easily, at least for now. Drought over one set of fields is usually offset somewhere else in the grain belt. That won't help us much when the temperature really climbs, as every computer model now predicts, but so far the public is not scared enough to make it an issue, something that our politicians instinctively realize.

Europeans care -- or at least enough of them care that in a parliamentary system they can exert sufficient pressure to move their governments. Americans don't, not yet.

For those of us who have been working on this issue for a decade or more, it's sometimes hard to imagine that there could be anyone anywhere who does not realize that the freaking earth is coming to an end. But, of course, the guy I sat next to on the airplane home -- a perfectly decent engineer who had voted Democratic -- greeted the news of where I'd been with only the most casual interest. "Oh yeah, I've heard about that," he said when I mentioned global warming. "So tell me, is that stuff for real or not?" It's a strong indictment of the insider, deal-making, tech-talking American environmental community -- and of the Clinton-Gore administration, which blew a decade it could have spent educating the citizenry.

The day will come when Americans will be convinced of the reality of climate change -- probably the day after a really big hurricane. When that day comes, we will badly need all the ideas that have been patiently hammered out in places like The Hague. But until that day comes, events like the collapse of these talks may be (sadly) less momentous than they seem.

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