The majority of executives and consumers polled in a survey in July do not think the majority of businesses are committed to “going green.” Only 29 percent of executives and 16 percent of consumers polled think that the majority of businesses are committed to “going green.” Almost half (45 percent) of executives and 48 percent of consumers think that only “some” are businesses committed to sustainability.
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Ron Loch, Senior Vice-President for Greentech& Sustainability at Gibbs & Soell said, “While surveys consistently show consumers have a preference, and even a willingness to pay a premium, for green products, the question is often asked without the full context of performance and convenience.”
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The majority (78 percent) of executives cited an insufficient return on investment as an obstacle to “going green,” and 71 percent cite consumers’ unwillingness to pay a premium for green products or services. More than two in five executives (45 percent) cited a difficulty in evaluating sustainability across the entire life cycle of a product as an obstacle.
via www.triplepundit.com
Eeery foreshadowing. On Monday, October 18, at the Heartland Environmental and Resource Economics at Illinois, a team of researchers* from The university with The top (or 4th or 10th) ranked department of agricultural and resource economics in the U.S. will be presenting groundbreaking (hyperbole) research entitled: “Integration of life cycle impact assessment and choice analysis for comprehensive motor vehicle fuel evaluation in the United States.”
Here's the abstract:
We develop a framework for modeling the technological, economic, environmental, and social impacts of the life cycle of six transportation fuels (Gasoline, E10, E85, Diesel, Biodiesel20, and Biodiesel100), by linking engineering based life cycle analysis of transportation fuels with choice analysis techniques for eliciting and understanding the social preferences for multi-attribute consumption vectors. The use of life-cycle data allows us to account for a broad range of environmental, natural resource, and health effects over the entire production and consumption life cycle of each transportation fuel. Combining these life cycle and stated choice analyses allows for social preferences to be established for the externalities resulting from the use of the different transportation fuels. This results in a unique physical-economic feedback model allowing for improved design and evaluation of transportation policy. In the extreme case of complete conversion to each of the five alternative fuels popularized as environmentally and health friendly alternatives to gasoline, environmental and human health benefits actually decline. Natural resource conservation improves for all of the fuels except diesel, but overall social welfare declines significantly for all five of the alternatives. Thus, after accounting for life cycle costs, many popular “alternative” fuel options offer little apparent environmental and health benefits, calling into question policies encouraging their adoption as “green” fuels. For policies with the intent of reducing foreign oil dependency and encouraging resource conservation, these same fuels may have merit. Our results indicate that significant trade-offs between environmental damage, human health risks and resource depletion rates will have to be made in any attempt to implement alternative fuel policy at a national level.
The paper will be available as soon as i get off my lazy @$$ and finish editing section 2.
*Matthew Winden, Nathan Cruz, Tim Haab, and Bhavik Bakshi (Ohio State U.).
