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The rumour mill has been rumbling on about oil reaching $200 a barrel by the end of the year, I forget where the stories have come from. But when the someone from Goldman Sachs reports that $200 a barrel oil is likely then you just have to sit up and take notice.

Argun Murti, energy strategist at Goldman Sachs, said that rising worldwide demand for oil and limited supply will push the price of a barrel of oil up to $200 in the next six months to 2 years. Murti’s previous predictions that oil would reach $100 a barrel (when it was at $55 a barrel) were true, and with oil prices rising 25% in the last year and by 400% since 2001, it looks like $200 will be correct too.

The usual suspects in this current situation are China, with its voracious appetite for oil, and India, whose economy is booming. As somebody at the ethical clothing company Howies said in a catalogue a few years back… “and what if they all want a car?” That’s more than 2 billion souls in China & India…

So much for the world reducing its dependence on oil

Protesters from Greenpeace, some dressed in ape suits, have demonstrated at the premises of Unilever in both London and the North West of England.

Unilever, the global Anglo-Dutch company with interests in food, drink, cleaning products and personal care items, is a major user of palm oil in many of its products. Formed back in 1930 as a merger between the British soap makers, Lever Brothers, and Dutch firm Margarine Unie, the company amalgamated to pool its resources as both products (soap & margarine) relied heavily in the use of palm oil.

Recently rain forests have been destroyed in Malaysia & Indonesia to make way for palm plantations to fuel the world’s burgeoning desire for products that happen to use palm oil. As a result many orang-utans have been displaced and killed; some species of orang-utan are on the endangered species list, with the Sumatran orang-utan being critically endangered.

The Greenpeace protests at the Unilever HQ in London and the manufacturing plant in the Wirral, Merseyside, have involved some 50 protesters, highlighting the need for Unilever to urgently introduce sustainable methods of palm oil usage.

Unilever does chair the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil which aims to “promote the growth and use of sustainable palm oil” but Greenpeace fears the slow progress of the group. Whilst the RSPO discusses ways to be sustainable rainforests are still being cleared to make way for the production of palm oil.

Unilever states that it is leading the way to find sustainable palm oil solutions but this could simply be just Greenwash.

The BBC’s speculatively-titled story “Chancellor looks to green budget” is pretty thread-bare, starting with the opening line:

Green taxes and measures to help people struggling to pay energy bills are likely to be among changes in the chancellor’s first Budget on Wednesday.

It goes on to speculate that the chancellor, Alistair Darling, might put a levy on larger vehicles like people carriers, putting their price up by £2000.

And that’s it!

Well, if that’s all the chancellor can do for green issues in the UK Budget on Wednesday then that’s pretty poor for helping people go green. Isn’t a people carrier a more efficient way of carrying 6 or 7 people than having to drive 2 vehicles? If there’s any truth in that rumour then it would be a right poke in the eye for people who car-share.

We understand putting taxes on the least fuel efficient vehicles, but isn’t that why some people pay more road tax than others and why inefficient vehicles cost more to run purely from the fact that their MPG is so poor?

Come on Darling, where’s the incentives to go green. Saying “you can’t do this” or “can’t do that” is simply negative. Why don’t you give us:

• Increased grants for home solar projects
• Increased grants for home insulation
• More green spaces for community allotments
• Increase tax on the most polluting vehicles
• Greater taxes on polluting businesses
• A stop on the expansion of any more UK airports
• Serious public debate over nuclear energy

etc etc

That would be a good start. He’s already effectively nationalised the Northern Rock bank, why can’t he part-nationalise some of our public transport to stop the greedy private companies from milking the public?

Let’s wait until Wednesday, aye?

After the little town of Modbury in Devon banned carrier bags last year, it has taken a long time for anyone else in England to catch up.

In fact nobody has caught up yet, there are just schemes to deter shoppers from using the dreaded polluting plastic bags, of which a staggering 13 billion are given away free every year across the country. Taking around 1000 years to decay, it’s no wonder something needs to be done about the “white trash”.

Step in Marks & Spencer, the forward-thinking, environmentally-friendly eco-warrior of big-name high street retailers, you know, the guys who bought us Plan A (Because there is no Plan B).

Well, OK, Marks & Sparks haven’t quite gone the whole hog yet but they are going to charge shoppers a whole 5 new pence to buy a carrier bag in future. And the future is not now, the future is 6 May 2008. And for a month before the levy comes into place, those nice people at Marks & Spencer will be giving away long-lasting placcy bags that discerning shoppers can reuse.

So what’s bought this about? Well, M&S ran a trial in 50 of its stores where they charged a mere 5 pence for their plastic carrier bags and demand for the oil-derived receptacles fell by 70%. Seemingly the scheme had a great impact and the 5 pence “tax” made shoppers think.

It’s all part of M&S Chief Exec Sir Stuart Rose’s commitment for the chain to reduce their waste to zero to landfill, as detailed in their Plan A. So come on all you other big name stores… where’s your plans to charge for carrier bags?

WRAP, the Waste and Recycling Action Programme, has withdrawn its scheme to help Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (Small businesses to you and me) do their recycling.

In a shock move, just four months after the scheme was launched, WRAP pulled the plug on their “Funding Support Scheme for Recycling Services to Business”.

The scheme was introduced in October last year to give UK small businesses a boost in going green by supporting the groups that offer recycling services to small business.

Defra, the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs slashed its budget to WRAP’s scheme by 30%.

Sad.

Nokia’s President and CEO unveiled a new concept Nokia mobile phone that is, at last, pretty environmentally friendly.

The new Nokia concept mobile, branded “Remade” is supposedly constructed from nothing new, thus reducing the carbon footprint of the device, using less raw materials, reducing landfill waste and making the whole production process more energy efficient.

The Nokia remade is a recycled, post-consumer piece of modern technology. Made from recycled aluminium (old drinks can), plastic from recycled plastic bottles, old car tyres and, rather than the old acid-etched circuit board, the green mobile phone has printed electronics.

But before you rush out and ask for a Nokia Remade to replace your funky iPhone or N95, remember that this is just a concept phone. For now.

Let’s hope Nokia do the right thing and start using recycled material in ALL their products.

The National Trust has a novel idea for environmental work this leap year with it’s own Green Leap Day.

All of the Trust’s 4800 staff are being encouraged to take February 29th off and focus their efforts into green projects. The idea is that staff will work on going green at home with numerous simple household tasks such as:

• Changing lightbulbs to energy-efficient lightbulbs
• Draught-proofing windows & doors
• Insulating loft spaces
• Building a compost-heap in the garden
• Organising the household recycling
• Fixing up environmental transport, making sure bicycles are fixed

Staff who have already gone green are being encouraged to help out in community projects such as at their local schools.

The whole idea revolves around people actually getting up and doing work for the environment rather than merely talking about it… So we’d better get on with some work then, shouldn’t we?

Ed - This might not be ideal for every business but what a great idea - if only other big organisations had the foresight and the balls to do their bit for the environment and not just on 1 day in every four years either, but at least it’s a start!

Globalisation is a fascinating concept: you buy goods that are cheap because they were made in a country where the production costs are lower and then you wonder why the company down the road making the same local goods at local prices goes out of business!

Seriously though, that may be a bit harsh as there are (some) good sides to globalisation. Take, for instance, specialist software developers - we’ve had first hand experience that if you can’t find a local developer it’s OK that you go shopping in Australia and Holland if that’s where you find the exact skills you’ve been looking for.

But it’s the original opening scenario that is worrying and very topical - The United States, in desperate attempts to stave off a recession, is planning tax rebates to boost the economy. Individuals will get up to $600 and married couples up to $1200. Those couples with children will get an additional $300 per child.

Now this may seem surreal and a little sensationalist giving people back the money they paid to government, to the tune of $100 billion for households and $50 billion for business, so that they can spend more to then help their own economy. Will it boost the fortunes of the world’s (current) biggest polluter? Maybe, we’ll have to wait and see.

But what does this have to do with globalisation? The fact is that the tax plans have caused Asian markets to rally on the news. Why?

As somebody interviewed in that BBC news story remarked:

“The markets are reacting to news that Bush and Congress have agree[d] to accelerate tax rebates for US consumers so they can go out and buy more exports from Asia”

So it looks like the American economy does well by its own people buying boatloads of foreign goods. That seems to be a very precarious situation to be in and a huge green flag to encourage rampant consumerism in order to further even greater globalisation.

So what happens when the Asian economies develop to such an extent that their prices catch up with those in the West? Where do consumers buy their cheap goods? Does the economy stumble again? Is this a scary enough scenario to get everybody to buy local?

Japan’s Oji Paper has admitted to lying “for decades” about the amount of recycled paper in their products.

The leading paper maker in Japan has come clean about the fact that, in one case, the amount of recycled fibre in their copy paper was not 50% as claimed but only between 5 and 10%.

Some of Oji Paper’s envelopes were thought to contain as much as 70% recycled paper whereas the real content was just 30%.

Oji Paper’s admissions come hot on the heals of Nippon Paper Group who also greenwashed their products, especially millions of new year greeting cards where again the proportion of post-consumer paper was much lower than the company boasted.

Nippon Paper’s shares dropped 10% on the news and Oji Paper’s shares fell 5% with Fuji Xerox and other firms stating they would not stock Nippon Paper’s products.

Kazuhisa Shinoda, Oji Paper’s president, refused to resign but did take full responsibility and apologised for misleading clients & consumers. He attributed the drop in recycled materials to increased orders yet falling amounts of recycled material entering the production process.

This item is bought to you on a recycled story

It looks like the deadlock at the UN Bali summit has been broken.

After two weeks of intense talks it would have been a shambolic waste of time, money and effort for the summit to end without an agreement, without a clear path, no roadmap to a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

But which way did it go? What did the UN head, Ban Ki Moon, do to reach an agreement?

As we reported yesterday, the stalemate was between, chiefly, the US & Canada on one side, refusing to be held to strict reduction targets, and Europe & Australia on the other, keen to reduce emissions to certain targets. The second part of the issue was whether developing countries such as China & India with their burgeoning consumption and rapid climb toward the “western ways”. Whilst Europe would allow developing countries to have slimmer targets the US wished for them to be subject to the stricter curbs.

The outcome?

Apparently, right at the end of the conference, the US had signalled it would not sign to the agreement to the disdain of many delegates who jeered and booed the indication. Then at the last minute, the US agreed.

So what happens next?

The Bali Roadmap will mean that negotiations will continue over the next 2 years between the 192 ountries and hopefully we will get some commitment to actually cutting greenhouse gases. In the meantime, us citizens of the world can carry on doing our bit to cut our own emissions, live a greener lifestyle and hopefully the politicians will catch up with us soon.