EclecticLip

I attended the Peter Senge lecture at the Vancouver Board of Trade yesterday. He’s the MIT lecturer who wrote “The Fifth Discipline” years ago, about learning organizations. His latest is “The Necessary Revolution”, about corporate efforts to develop true, legitimate, authentic sustainability. He made some very interesting comments, detailed below the fold: - first off, a lot of corporate leaders manage their businesses with a three-month timeframe (wanting to “make the numbers” or “beat the street”), at the expense of the longer term. When it comes to their children, however, the same individuals have little difficulty focussing on the ten- and twenty-year timeframe. This reminded me of a recent article by “The Black Swan” author Nassim Taleb, describing how the financial sector’s bonus system encouraged executives to make high-risk decisions. In the one-year timeframe they’d reap rich rewards, knowing the system wouldn’t blow up for a decade or longer — and knowing that when the blow-up occurred, they wouldn’t be forced to return any of the money. Not unlike the fact that most of us won’t be around to face the horrifying damage our lifestyle has caused. This general issue is nicely touched on, in this past Tuesday’s Dilbert cartoon. - apparently the air pockets in the Nike Air product line used to be filled not just with air, but with sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) – the most potent greenhouse gas known to humanity! It took fourteen years for Nike to figure out how to use a substitute (plan old nitrogen). Nike has claimed to have cut its carbon footprint 75% since its efforts began (the elimination of SF6 must’ve helped substantially with that). - - - - - - - - finally, coming to the subject line: bottled water has gotten a lot of criticism, and rightly so, at least in first-world jurisdictions with fine potable water (like Vancouver). But bottled water is still less damaging to the environment than pop. Here’s why: all told, it takes about 5 Litres of water to deliver 1 L of bottled water. (Most of that comes from making the bottle.) But for pop, you have to factor in the water required to grow the sugar: about 200 Litres (!) of water per Litre of Coke. If people switched en masse from pop to bottled water, there’d be a lot less stress on agricultural aquifers in sugar-growing regions around the world. Since much of the world is conducive to either sugarcane (tropical) or sugar beets (temperate) that’s a lot of water that could be saved. Mind you, I suppose one could also achieve this effect if everyone switched to diet soft drinks…