Sustainable Living Hong Kong

If there was a Greenwash of the Year Award, Bonaqua would surely win it hands down.

You know, the bottled water manufacturer has apparently reduced the amount of materials used for making its plastic bottles, as they tell us in their commercials, so now their bottled water is said to be an environmentally friendly product!

Even in places that lack clean water, water filters are preferable to bottled water because of the amount of energy, water and materials that need to be used to package it into a product that should essentially be free. Hong Kong’s water is clean enough to be taken straight from the tap – and people regularly do just that in parks where water fountains are provided.

The problem is people are too lazy to carry their own water bottles around, so they’d rather pay a few dollars for bottled water at the nearest convenience store. But these few dollars barely reflect the true cost of making that product. The diagram below, from the paper “Energy implications of bottled water” by P H Gleick and H S Cooley, shows where energy is consumed to make and transport the bottled water.

Can we afford to waste energy like that? Given the state of the planet, the only way to make these manufacturers account for the costs that they currently externalise with abandon is to introduce a tax that adequately reflect the true costs of wasting precious resources on a marketing gimmick.

The idea may seem radical just a couple of years ago, but isn’t anymore. Governments will have to introduce a carbon tax sooner or later – sooner if possible, as the carbon reduction they promised to make at the climate change summit in Copenhagen last December is so inadequate that world temperatures will rise by 3.5ºC by 2100 if nothing further is done.

The Wall Street Journal Asia weekend edition reviewed the Porsche Cayenne S Hybrid, proclaiming “Porsche takes a big step into being green.”  Just how big a step is that?

The Cayenne is a top-of-the line SUV which would normally be called a gas guzzler/emblem of conspicuous consumption. By using hybrid technology in the engine and adding electronic controls to cut fuel drain, the Cayenne hybrid achieves a 25-30% improvement in fuel economy, or around 23/26 MPG city/highway (9-10 litres per 100 km).  Porsche also boasts that the Cayenne hybrid reduces CO2 emissions to “just 193 g/km”.  This is significant, given that any other car with an engine larger than 4 litres will normally emit well over 200 and sometimes 300 g/km CO2.  These figures appear to be significant improvements indeed.

But, before you run out to buy the car in order to brush up your green credentials, do consider several factors which are conveniently disregarded in the WSJ write-up.

First, the environmental impacts of a vehicle include not just the fuel economy and CO2 emissions while operating, but the CO2 emissions and resources consumed in production.  The auto industry largely reports only on the CO2 emissions from their own facilities, but given that most auto parts have been outsourced to third party suppliers, it’s clear that a lot is excluded a priori.  Even under these conditions, the CO2 emitted in the auto brand’s own facilities is estimated to account for 15-20% of the auto’s total CO2 emissions over a life of 15 years.   The Cayenne Hybrid is five tons of steel –even a rough counting of the emissions from components and manufacturing come to much higher than just 20%.

Second, while the hybrid model emissions are an improvement upon the baseline 6-litre model, 193 g/km CO2 is still very high.  The EU is considering legislation which would put a cap on CO2 emissions of just 120 g/km for the majority of passenger vehicles. Non-hybrid sedans emit between 100 and 150 g/km.  Automakers argue that larger vehicles deserve a higher cap, which may be true when applied to buses and vans, but in the consumer segment, there are good reasons why choosing an SUV (over a sedan) is not a necessity, but rather an environmentally poor choice which should bear costs.

The US is the largest SUV market in the world, and it’s no surprise that US autos emit an average of 255 g/km CO2, compared to 130.8 g/km for Japan and 140 g/km for Europe.  Bringing these numbers down significantly requires that people steer clear of environmentally bad choices like SUVs, rather than looking to make marginal improvements on bad choices.  But this would be bad for Porsche, so they just don’t mention it. Indeed, any company that benefits from an economy in which rising consumption is good and in which happiness is defined in terms of possessions, would lose if it told consumers the truth about their choices.

Thus, we are subject to a constant stream of misinformation that peddles a fundamentally unsustainable product as something clean and green.  Don’t buy it.

Amid the widespread coverage of the devastating flooding and landslides in Pakistan and China, one news story in one paper caught my eye: the trauma inflicted on a passenger of the helicopter that ditched into Victoria Harbour.

While the hoi polloi have to make do with the humble ferry, this high-powered executive took what turned out to be an unsuccessful ride on a helicopter for a trip from Hong Kong to Macau. But for the manoeuvres of the skilful pilot, there might have been a sad loss of lives. One would have thought someone who’d gone through such a trauma would much rather sit tight on dry land for a while. But no – said executive promptly gathered his family for a flight to an exotic hideout for the rich and famous – to forget about what had happened. Of course.

Oh, and to think of it: he couldn’t take his private chartered flight back to London because that plane took a dive too, so he had to make alternative arrangements.

Now, after all that flying around on private jets, how much carbon emissions would you reckon he’d worked up? You’d expect him of all people to know – for the guy heads “Sustainable Forestry for Life”, an investment vehicle that sells carbon credits. You’d also expect him to know better than to fly around on exclusive shuttles when alternative forms of transport that produce less greenhouse gas emissions are available. Maybe he reckons he can spew the carbon emissions one moment, and happily offset it by buying up land for re-forestation. Or maybe it doesn’t matter: it’s just the investors who have to do that; he just makes the money from selling these credits so he can do whatever he pleases.

So is the tragedy the fact that Sky Shuttle has not responded to his claim for a waterlogged BlackBerry? No, the real tragedy is that the story should get so much coverage in the Post – front page and page 4 – more than one month after the incident, while the stories of Pakistan and China were quickly bumped off to the inside pages. The real tragedy is also the fact that someone ostensibly involved in promoting sustainability should display such flagrant disregard for climate change.

There’s no denying the fact that he saved a friend’s life in the incident. But there’s also no denying the certainty that, if he and others like him continue their current lifestyle, his young children won’t have a decent life of their own when they get to his age. Catastrophic climate change would make sure of that.

Superman Li Ka Shing has just announced his decision to pledge a third of his assets to charity.

Before the applause breaks out though, let’s take a pause and look at a parallel announcement by Hutchison Whampoa of plans to spin off its subsidiary Husky Energy.

That’s right, Husky, the “Canadian-based integrated energy and energy-related company”, “one of the top holders of oil sands resource in Alberta with more than 2,700 square kilometres of oil sands leases … located in the resource-rich areas of Athabasca and Cold Lake, with smaller land holdings in the Peace River deposit.”

While European oil and gas companies such as Shell and BP find it necessary to at least pay token attention to environmental concerns by coming up with greenwash about investing in renewable energy or being socially responsible, Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa apparently has no such worries in, alas, environmentally green – green, as in being still wet around the ears – Hong Kong, as the quotes from its website above illustrates.

Husky and BP sealed a joint-venture agreement to extract oil from Canadian tar sands back in 2007. Unlike conventional oil, extracting oil from tar sands is an energy-consuming and intensely polluting business. Using tar sands to produce one barrel of oil is estimated to generate three to five times the greenhouse gas emissions of producing the same barrel from conventional oil.

Not only that. The energy return on investment ratio (EROI) from tar sands is ridiculously low. For comparison, when oil was so plenty in the US of the 1930s that it almost gushed out of the surface with a little poking, it took the energy equivalent of just one barrel of oil to find, extract, and process about 100 barrels of oil, or an EROI of 100:1. Nowadays, it’s down to about 14:1 because conventional oil is getting harder and harder to find and extract.

For tar sands, the ratio is 2:1 to 4:1, depending on the analyst you talk to. In addition to being hugely polluting, the process of extracting oil from tar sands also consumes huge amounts of water and natural gas – all so an energy company can make lots of money and be spun off from its parent. Extracting oil from tar sands is such a bad idea, it’s been described as “turning gold into lead”.

And it gets better: Huskey apparently sells an oil product which consists of oil from tar sands and 10% ethanol from wheat and corn. Which, surely, are better used feeding us?? And ethanol’s EROI? 1.2:1 – worse than tar sands. And better still: Huskey calls the product, ahem, “Mother Nature’s Fuel”.

Would the one-third of the US$21 billion Li Ka Shing bequeaths to charity cover the cost of climate change? It’s doubtful whether that US$7 billion would be enough just to rehabilitate Alberta’s freshwater resources and decimated landscape. So what’s the point of his philanthropy exactly?

The property tycoons want to bite back.

Fed up with negative coverage of their wealth-siphoning activities, one of them – the one who got so much flak over the Hung Hom peninsula saga and the subsequently aborted hiring of a former Buildings Department chief – wants to buy a newspaper so he can get the press to say what he wants them to say.

One shouldn’t be too alarmed perhaps, since the Hong Kong Daily News is already owned by yet another tycoon. But if reports are to be believed and the tycoon plans to turn it into a free tabloid, then civil society had better be prepared for this manipulation of public opinion.

My jaw dropped recently at a presentation about research commissioned by the Climate Change Business Forum, about how buildings can be designed to generate its own electricity and be more energy-efficient. Apparently the research has the support of the Real Estates Developers’ Association, as one of the first slides indicated.

This isn’t surprising if we’re talking about commercial buildings that they build for lease, as they will save operating cost by adopting such technologies. But ordinary residential buildings that they sell at outrageous prices? The only plausible explanation, it seems to me, is that, realising the developers will not implement measures to cut the energy consumption of their buildings when left to self-regulate, the government has finally introduced mandatory building energy codes. And now that they’re forced to spend more money to improve energy efficiency, they’re only too happy to take credit for it.

For more positive news of what the tycoons get up to, wait for the new Hong Kong Daily News.

A researcher talking me through trials of different LED lighting systems recently was moaning about the lack of standards covering this field.

As a result, the luminance of some LED systems can drop significantly within months, which means they’re not likely to work well over their purported lifespan of ten years or more. But, he added brightly, China wants to be a leader of green manufacturing and is expected to come up with a standard for LEDs.

What with solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars, China is surely shaping up to be a green manufacturing powerhouse. What a way to grow the economy, eh?

But wait a minute: China is building more coal-fired power plants to supply the electricity to power these manufacturing concerns – to such an extent that Ma Jun, founder and director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affair, was prompted to observe: “It’s so ironic that we’re using coal power plants to manufacture energy-efficient lights.”

Sure, older, dirtier plants are being closed and the new ones are cleaner and more efficient, but remember the Jevons Paradox? As the absolute volume of production goes up, efficiency gains will inevitably be wiped out. The net effect: continuing increase in carbon emissions, albeit at a slower rate.

There are also two facts to bear in mind:

1. These ‘green’ industries are being promoted to generate export revenue, not to make China itself greener. Of the solar panels produced, for example, 90% are exported.
2. The processes involved in making these ‘green’ products are themselves polluting or require the use of non-renewable resources. The manufacture of solar panels produces a highly toxic by-product, silicon tetrachloride, while wind turbines and electric cars require the use of rare earth, which is extracted through highly polluting mining operations.

Many who are willing to concede that economic growth is no longer viable for developed countries nevertheless insist that it’s necessary for developing countries to grow in order to reduce poverty, but research has shown that, under the growth model, US$166 of additional global production and consumption is required per US$1 of poverty reduction.

“It created the paradox that ever smaller amounts of poverty reduction amongst the poorest people of the world required ever larger amounts of conspicuous consumption by the rich,” said the research authors.

The end result may be poverty reduction in absolute dollar terms, but worsening of the wealth gap, which has far more debilitating effects than ‘poverty’. But more of that in the next post.

The gentleman was right and I was wrong.

Hearing that I’d just alerted the police to a fake monk defrauding tourists near the Peak Tram, he sniffed at the inconsequential act. Why did I begrudge the fake monk his little scam, when one on a much larger scale is perpetrated on tourists every day?

Look at all the fake attractions. Sun Yat Sen had nothing to do with Sun Yat Sen Museum; it was originally the residence of a Eurasian family, and the whole “Sun Yat Sen trail” leading up to the museum has none of the original places where Dr Sun had lived, learnt or conferred with fellow revolutionaries. But of course, tourists can follow the spanking new retro-looking railings and plaques all the way up the hill.

Look at the old Marine Police headquarters in Tsim Sha Tsui. Hey, the heritage structure has been ‘revitalised’! Signal Hill couldn’t signal its distress as the Cheung Kong bulldozers levelled it to make way for its till-ringing shoppers’ paradise, and now nothing but a handful of banyans the developer was forced to keep remained, looking lonesome and grasping for breath.

Or how ’bout Murray House, once taking pride of place in Central with the waters of Victoria Harbour lapping at its base. The stones that made up the original facade were taken to Stanley for such a ‘restoration’ that even the ghosts of those tortured inside by the Japanese during the war must be scared to go on haunting it.

The fake monk promises nirvana; the government promises a visitors’ paradise. In both cases, the tourists just go home with lungs full of foul air.

I shuddered upon receipt of information about a “Creative Capitalism Forum”.

It wasn’t just that the phrase put in mind a similar one – ‘creative accounting’ – but also what the flyer promised the forum was all about: “to explore sustainable social and economical development strategies”, “initiating the Asian discussion as a basis to drive sustainable economic growth and improved social equity”, etc.

Nowhere is the environment mentioned. Climate change? Nada.

What’s scary is the fact that the people involved – Bill Gates started the concept in the west – do not register the impossibility of what they’re proposing. I don’t doubt the sincerity of those who support the idea of ’social enterprises’; the system is so powerful nobody sees that it’s all an illusion.

It’s like the panelists who talked about “Global Ethic and the Global Economy” at the Hong Kong Institute of Education yesterday. They were all sincere in wanting proper implementation of corporation social responsibility (CSR) and for managers to receive proper training in ethics. But none of them had an answer to my question: is a mining company that’s conscientious about treating its staff well, whose business, by its nature, involves destroying a mountain, in the process displacing the native people and the habitat of native species of plants and animals, ethical?

Someone came up to me afterwards to say, basically, that’s too bad because if there’s no mining there’ll be no raw materials for all the goods that contribute towards our ‘progress’. Well, what kind of goods are we talking about? The Hello Kitty dolls that, amusingly, lined the dashboard of the shuttle bus that took some of us to HKIEd? The fancy Porsches and Ferraris that burn petrol like there’s no tomorrow, some of whose owners care nothing about scaring the daylights out of cyclists and other people as they speed down Bride’s Pool Road and Clearwater Bay Road?

It seems that we’re all so trapped within this capitalist framework that we can’t see, objectively, where it’ll all end. Economic growth cannot be sustainable. Go watch the Impossible Hamster again to understand what I mean.

Do you know there are different types of sustainability? On first impression, one may be inclined to define it simply as a state of dynamic equilibrium in which input and output is so balanced that the state may be maintained indefinitely.

In reality, human development has reached such a state of utter imbalance that sustainability can only be talked about in relative terms. For example, Sir Crispin Tickell has rated humanity’s chance of surviving to the end of this century at 50:50; it all depends on what we do about climate change. If we are able to limit temperature increase to no more than 2°C by making substantial cuts to our carbon emissions, we may stand a better chance of making it, but this would entail drastic measures like curtailing our consumerist lifestyle and a complete overhaul of the prevailing economic model. That would be ‘hard’ sustainability – the type that promises a real chance of survival, at least for another generation or two.

But as you can see from this chart, this looks unlikely, and since ‘hard’ sustainability does not provide for corporate or political survival, what we’ve ended up with is ’soft’ sustainability. Call it a euphemism for greenwash.

What is ’soft’ sustainability? It’s mostly measures that make those who adopt them feel good or look good, but which, in the larger scheme of things, make little difference. Things like using less paper in the office (but printing copious volumes of prospectuses), refraining from offering plastic bags (but continuing to cling-film fruits and vegetables), or recycling plastic bottles (but continuing to manufacture bottled water).

In this context, corporate “climate leadership” makes sadly amusing reading. Amusing because it makes greenwashing so glamorous – and sad because those who take part, having been brainwashed by their training and education, are unable to see the irony and inadequacy of what they do. Like someone employed to chase credit card debts feeling appalled, after counting trees in a forest with the Earthwatch Institute, that he used to drive miles to and from work and wanting to cut his carbon footprint by carpooling, but without ever reflecting on exactly what purchases give rise to those credit card debts he chases for his company. (Oh, you read the Post Magazine story did you?)

The truth is, neither the bank that champions this “climate leadership” nor its multinational clients have a future in a world that needs ‘hard’ sustainability to survive; a world in which small-scale, local productions minimise environmental impact and things are much less monetised and therefore subject to the kind of manipulation that almost brought the world to its knees recently.

We’re awash with this ’soft’ sustainability here in Hong Kong.

Is a maker of bottled water an ‘Earth Partner’? Can a maker of bottled water be an Earth Partner?

The question loomed large as greenwash splashed all over the Earth Day edition of the paper yesterday. Well, what’s to be expected of companies whose very existence is threatened by climate change? Just look at the airlines pressuring European governments to reopen air space even though it’s uncertain how safe it would be to do so given the ash fallout. We’re talking about serious losses of money here, who cares about potential loss of life, eh?

Back to the bottled water. Do you know what’s ‘embedded water’?

Hong Kong consumers already top the world when it comes to per capita water use (219 litres vs 150 litres for the average UK consumer, for instance), but that’s just direct water use, for things like taking a shower. Some Hong Kongers are keen to save water, but only so they don’t have to pay so much in what is already a low water tariff by world standards – by sending their domestic helpers to take their showers and wash the vegetables in the clubhouse changing room. I must say that’s a use to which I’ve never guessed residential clubhouses can be put!

What about the higher amount of ‘embedded water’ – water used to produce goods and services for our consumption – we use? In the UK, that is ten times the amount of water directly used.

According to a report released by the Engineering the Future alliance in the UK, the amount of water used to produce food and goods imported by developed countries is worsening water shortages in the developing world. Entitled “Global Water Security”, the report warns that water security is under severe pressure from overpopulation, urbanisation, the impact of dietary change as countries develop, increasing pollution of water resources, the over-extraction of groundwater and climate change.

It noted that developed nations have been meeting some of their water needs by importing ‘virtual’ water: goods and services that draw on the water resources of other countries, some of which are under water stress. In the UK, this accounts for over two-thirds of the country’s water footprint. It is estimated that every litre of bottled water need three times that amount to produce; a cup of coffee embeds about 140 litres of water, a cotton T-shirt about 2,000 litres, and a kilogram of steak 15,000 litres.

Can we go on living like this when billions don’t even have enough safe drinking water?