My organisation, DayEight, has been working with the Salvation Army and Fairtrade Australia for sometime now. We have been looking at ways to encourage the large confectionery manufacturers to bite the bullet and go Fairtrade.
In recent weeks the Salvos and I met and it was mentioned in the meeting that “Cadbury is just refusing to budge, what more can we do to make them wake up and recognise their responsibilities to the poor”.
I have recently been involved in a number of discussions with gen Xers+ focusing on “what you young people stand for”. It has been pointed out that each generation had a central theme of concern that ran through their lives. There was the second world war for my grandparents, which was about fighting for the empire, for commonwealth. My parents had Vietnam, and the ‘Peace, Love and Brown Rice’ movement. It was all about anti-establishment, counter-government. But what is it that I, and my peers, stand for?
There has been a whole lot of talk recently about bio-fuels. There are those who think it is evil, and others who think they are the ‘Holy Grail of Green Energy’. The truth is probably somewhere between these two perspectives; bio-fuels will be necessary, but not sufficient, for the green economy of the future.
As a young person I am always skeptical about big business, especially when it comes to claims about their pro-environmental stance. In particular I have long wondered how genuine the big oil companies could really be about going ‘green’. BP is perhaps the one oil company that has chosen to market itself as being environmentally friendly. It has been running with the “Beyond Petroleum’ tagline for some time now.
The US has recently seen its hugely successful ‘Cash for Clunkers’ program close. This program gave $4,500 to encourage people to trade in their inefficient old cars for new, low emission alternatives. It was a very cost effective way to encourage a rapid increase in the nation’s fuel efficiency.
Australia spends many millions of dollars each year to give ‘first-home-owner’ grants to homebuyers, with grants designed to encourage home ownership and the purchase of newly built homes. If it is ok for the government to pay people to buy new homes, why arnt we considering paying people to buy fuel-efficient and hybrid vehicles? In a world where drastic CO2 omission cuts are needed, shouldnt all options be on the table? After all, Australian passenger cars account for 7.8% of total emissions. This is a number which can be dramatically reduced simply through encouraging greater numbers of fuel efficient car purchases.
