RealGreen

The UK’s Carbon Trust has just launched a new carbon labelling scheme for consumer products (their examples on the website include crisps/chips, shampoo and fruit drinks). With luck, Walkers Cheese and Onion crisps will be available mid-April 2007 and Boots’ Botanics and Ingredients shampoos in July. Innocent Smoothies will be described on their website soon.

To qualify for the scheme, a company must go through a carbon auditing scheme and comit to reducing the carbon footprint over the subsequent 2 years. You can read the summary and detailed methodology if interested This is a fraught area and I’m sure that there will be much discussion about the methodologies used – it’s a debate related to becoming carbon neutral – but putting a defined set of principles into practise is a bit step forwards.

I’ve talked a little previously about how I would like to be able to better regulate how what I buy affects my CO2 emissions (e.g. better packaging info and in tech reviews of gadgets). At the other end, it’s equally vague regarding how countries will decide to do the same. After all, it will only be worth-while me regulating my emissions in the long term if my efforts fit into an International framework.

How to bridge the gap? Well, the New Economics Foundation (NEF) has recently published a fantastic report reviewing the major competing solutions to be the Kyoto replacement. Their main conclusion is that a delayed “Contract and Convergence” method will work best. That is, we all agree to attain (mostly via contraction) a certain level of country-wide emissions that cause global CO2 concentrations to converge on a (lower) set value. To do this, countries will need to measure their CO2 output and consider how best to change in order to reduce it – and that means knowing the CO2 emissions of a whole range of activities.

For all this to happen, I believe that we’re all going to need to do the same thing as individuals. That provides the link between the two ends of the problem.