Too Big for Survival?

The UN News Center today announced the winners of the 2011 Supporting Entrepreneurs for Environment and Development (SEED) Awards. The winners:

• A company in Gambia that transforms ground nut shells into fuel briquettes.
• A company in Kenya where women produce aloe-based skin care products.

The awards recognize projects that promote sustainable development as part of a program that "spotlights new locally driven enterprises that have found creative ways to overcome environmental and developmental problems while also creating economic and social opportunities for their communities."

Tia Jackson, on Brandmaker News, has offered a list of 10 sustainable businesses to watch:

• Wash Cycle Laundry does its laundry pickup and delivery on bikes, uses natural and locally produced detergents, and uses high-efficiency machines.
• Sseko Designs creates footwear that hires college-bound women to make their sandals as part of program that funds their university educations.
• Tropical Traders Specialty Foods offers the first certified carbon neutral food in their Royal Hawaiian Honey, and offers Fair Trade honey from Brazil in their Bee Well Honey line.
• Liberty Bottleworks makes aluminum water bottles entirely from recycled aluminum. They're also the only metal water bottles made in the US.
• Bennu sells clothing and backpacks made from recycled materials, using recyled packaging, working with certified plants that offset carbon emissions.
• SunRidge Farms pays employees to bike to and from work, gives employees cloth bags to encourage them not to use plastic ones, and is investing in solar solutions for their facilities.
• Plywerk uses green techniques for photo mounting and the production of art panels.
• Andean Collection makes jewelry that engages in fair trade practices and engages in alternative use activities in Ecuador.
• Thai-Pepper produces teak cutting boards by harvesting the wood from old teak houses.
• Elizabeta Jewelry works with designers who use recycled or conflict-free diamonds and gemstones.

These are what we call capitalist enterprises; they're not just pipe dreams. It is the position of too many in the United States and other countries that the environment is simply to constricting and expensive to take into serious consideration as a part of doing business.

The US Rep to COP in Durban stated that, "We are making progress toward our target of reducing emissions in the range of 17 percent by 2020 through an array of domestic efforts, including robust new national fuel economy standards that will nearly double our automobile fleet efficiency by 2025 and the more than $90 billion of investments that we have made in clean energy."

Yet Mother Jones reports that a rider has already been inserted into the Interior Department's appropriations bill, section 453, which would prevent the government from either aiding carmakers in meeting those strict new standards or doing anything further to encourage fuel economy.

Why? As Mitt Romney puts it:

The EPA wants to be able to get in and grab more power and basically try and move the whole economy away from oil, gas, coal, nuclear and push it into the renewables. Look, we all like the renewables. But renewables alone are not going to power this economy. And yeah, I would, among other things, I would get the EPA out of its effort to manage carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles and trucks.

Romney's the one who gets criticized in the Republican primaries for being too centrist.

Really? Or perhaps, as stated by Naomi Klein:

I mean, renewable energy, if you compare it with fossil fuels, you know, it's everywhere. That's the point. That's why it is less profitable, because anybody can put a solar panel on their roof and have energy. And that's why there's such momentum against it from corporate America, because they want huge, centralized solutions, because they're way more profitable. Which isn't to say that you can't make a profit, you just can't make a stupid profit.

A thought: Perhaps it's not capitalist enterprises that can't *afford* to go green. Perhaps it's just monstrously large capitalist enterprises that cringe at any impingement on their insatiable need for profit. It was suggested by one of the Republican nominees last week that "when you're too big to fail, you're too big."

Perhaps when you're too big to respect the planet and your fellow human beings, you're too big.