July 10, 2009 By Dale Vince
Filed under: Energy
I’d like to declare today to be National Greenwash Day…
…to celebrate that relatively modern phenomenon of companies trying to sell themselves as being rather greener and more ethical than they really are. Today would be an apt day, it is after all – Green Britain Day. Where’s the Greenwash in that? Oh where to start.
Green Britain day comes to us courtesy of EDF. That’s Electricite de France to give them their full name. EDF is a French, state owned nuclear power company. They are also the world’s biggest corporate producer of nuclear waste, and one of it’s biggest traders and burners of coal – with a tiny tiny fleet of windmills (0.7% of their generation). And to promote this campaign they’ve ‘borrowed’ (as Fred Pearce gently puts it in this week’s Guardian) someone else’s logo – the green union jack. This flag symbolises two things, Green and British. EDF are of course neither.
This really does take Greenwash to a whole new level. It could almost be the plot of a slapstick comedy or a farce. If it wasn’t for the fact that they are seriously intent on convincing us Brits that they (EDF) and nuclear energy are green and good for Britain.
Stealing someone else’s clothes is not a new tactic in the world of big dirty business. And nor is Greenwash. Continue reading “Greenwash Day”
July 2, 2009 By Dale Vince
Filed under: Energy
Vive la différence
The most amazing thing has happened.
Our Green Union Jack – the one that Ecotricity’s been using for the last three years or so, has been ‘borrowed’ by another energy company.
We’re used to the Big Six energy companies behaving badly, but this is something else.
One of them decided that they liked the idea of a green union jack and the idea of a Green Britain so much – they’ve just gone and adopted it – lock, stock and barrel.
That would be shocking enough but the culprit is none other than EDF. Continue reading “The Green Union Hi Jack”
June 23, 2009 By Dale Vince
Filed under: Transport, Wind Car
Video production: Tim Walter Associates Limited
Is it a Nemesis?
It finally happened. Last Monday on a windswept old airfield in Norfolk, we got the wind car out of the workshop and took it for its first spin on tarmac.
Not entirely without a little drama mind you – the car barely being able to climb the transporter loading ramp at full throttle was a challenging start to the day… 
but we quickly enough adjusted the bugs out of that and it flew, really flew. Continue reading “The Wind Car — Epsiode 10 of 6″
June 4, 2009 By Dale Vince
Filed under: Food
The ‘Middlemen’
I wrote my first post on the subject of Food – “Can you be a meathead and a treehugger?” a while ago now.
Reading the responses (and feeling a bit of a slacker for not having posted anything back yet… ) – one element of the (lively) debate that struck me was that there were a number of ‘nutritional beliefs’ in play, beliefs that were in fact modern myths.
I thought it might be useful to examine the top ten of these myths, thinking that if we can deal with the ‘technical reasons’ for not changing diet then we might be left with purely choice driven issues – which might help the focus of debate.
I reached out to Dr Justine Butler of Viva for some help with this and between us, over the past few weeks we’ve compiled a list of the Top Ten Food Myths and busted them. You can read this here – take a look and see what you think. And pls feel free to pass the PDF version around.
Pulling this together gave me an interesting new perspective on food choice. It’s probably worth reading this ‘myth busting piece’ first, if you can. But here’s my new perspective; Continue reading “Treeheads and Meathuggers — Part Two”
May 26, 2009 By Dale Vince
Filed under: Transport, Wind Car
Video production: Tim Walter Associates Limited
This months highlights are;
Meeting the Sun’s environment correspondent – yes seriously. They’ve not had one very long but they do have one and he is serious about it – and:
That amazing machine at Leeds University – the one that looks like it belongs on a Sci Fi film, in fact I’m sure I’ve seen versions of it, recreating humans from DNA samples… In our case we used to make a ‘gear lever assembly’.
As you’ll see here we’re getting close to the end game now, in fact I’m ready to predict that episode 10 of 6 will see me driving the Wind Car for the first time… ! Continue reading “The Wind Car – Episode 9 of 6″
May 21, 2009 By Dale Vince
Filed under: Energy
The inconvenient facts…
I took some flack last week for my first post on this subject. I expected to of course. It’s not like I wasn’t advised against it. My view is that something wrong has been going on and the whistle needed blowing on it – for the greater good. Better we put our own house in order than have the Daily Mail do it for us.
I know that I wrote a strongly worded piece and if you’ve not been close to this issue over the years the passion/frustration may be hard to understand or easy to misunderstand. I’ll expand on that later – there’s an illuminating back story to tell.
And passions run high on both sides as we’ve seen, but a lot of what’s been posted has not been about the real issue here.
In this second post I want to pull the focus back to the facts.
Inconvenient facts. Continue reading “Good (Energy) Lies – part two”
May 12, 2009 By Dale Vince
Filed under: Energy
Something very strange/funny/quite awful has come to light in the last few weeks.
It starts with this:
For the last five years Good Energy (a small UK based green electricity supplier) has been claiming to retire 5% more ROCs than they are legally obliged to do. Supposedly to encourage other people to build new green generators.
It’s been their one big claim to green fame. And it’s the single thing that’s brought them recommendations from FOE (Friends Of the Earth), NCC (National Consumer Council) and Ethical Consumer magazine – and it’s brought them customers of course.
Good Energy have repeated this 5% claim in all their marketing material and pushed the recommendation of FOE and NCC consistently now for five years. It’s been a very simple bold claim – ‘we retire 5% more ROCs than our legal obligation’ is a typical format. No wriggle room there. You either do or you don’t.
Nobody ever thought to check if they actually have been doing this though, until two months ago when we first asked OFGEM. I’m not sure why, except we know them pretty well and it seemed more than possible to us that they were saying one thing and doing another. More on this later if anyone’s interested.
OFGEM had some trouble with their systems and their data and it took about two months to get the final, final version of the numbers, although they were pretty close to the first version to be fair.
The most amazing thing is Good Energy, according to OFGEM (the industry regulator and keeper of ROCs no less) have never, ever, in all this time – met a single promise to retire 5% ROCs. Not once in five years.
There was more – For the last two years Good Energy have retired no ROCs at all…!
You have to go back three years to find a year that they actually retired any ROCs in – And then they managed just 40% of their 5% promise.
We were pretty stunned.
We dug deeper. Continue reading “Good (Energy) Lies”
April 29, 2009 By Dale Vince
Filed under: Energy
£85 Million to be precise. Went to bed the night before feeling pretty normal and woke up in the Sunday Times Rich List. What’s that all about?
I’m not flagging this here to promote it, or brag about it – it’s just that it’s out there and I think I should say something about it. This kind of thing is easily misunderstood.
The ST have me down as worth £85 Million – this years sixth highest new entrant BTW – bit like top of the pops I thought…
We spotted it sat in a coffee shop, my partner Kate, Rui (our bubba) and I.
“You’re worth more than Robbie Williams” was Kate’s (almost) first comment – followed rather (too) swiftly by “let’s go shopping” …
There’s two things I wanted to say. Continue reading “Woke up Sunday morning… with a price on my head!”
April 17, 2009 By Dale Vince
Filed under: Transport, Wind Car
Video production: Tim Walter Associates Limited
Here’s our latest video. The big focus of this episode is design and, as you’ll see, it’s definitely taking shape.
I’m off to Norfolk next week to meet the Sun, they love the idea BTW, and nail down a few questions on detail (with the A team).
Couple more weeks after that I hope we might be having our first test drive, perhaps in episode 9 of 6 – but let’s see….
Some really cool names keep coming in. Though I’m back to thinking maybe zero. But as somebody said here, I reckon I’ll need to see the finished thing and drive it – then I’ll know its name.
There’s been a lot of electric car stuff in the news lately, particularly today with the Government’s announcement of a £5k bung to EV buyers and other initiatives.
The thing that excites me most of all though is the fact that the government has come out and said we all need to be driving electric cars, they even use terms like ‘green revolution’ these days – that’s just amazing, so far from where we’ve been.
It makes me think the changes we need to make are all the more likely. We know the technology exists or will exist and we know we need to live sustainably – now we seem to have political will behind us.
Just need to re invent capitalism to be orientated to social and environmental outcomes rather than monetary ones – and we’re there…..
Cheers.
April 1, 2009 By Dale Vince
Filed under: Transport, Wind Car
Video production: Tim Walter Associates Limited
Here’s the latest episode of our Wind Car series, clearly we’re running behind the original plan, with episode 7 of 6…
But hey ho, I don’t suppose the wheel was invented in a day – to mix metaphors a little. Continue reading “The Wind Car — Episode 7 of 6″
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