One Great Idea

It's one of this little irritants of modern life - the ban on taking liquids through airport security. Unless you want to shrivel and dry up on your journey, it's a choice between buying a bottle of water from one of the shops on the departures side or seeing what those nice people from Ryanair (or whomever) are charging these days for a bottle of water.

Choosing the former option the other day as I waited to board my flight to Spain, I stumbled across the option of buying One Water from the Duty Free shop. It's spring water from Wales and, besides being considerably cheaper that the French stuff on offer from WH Smiths, all of the profits from its sale go to clean water projects in Africa. Specifically funding Playpumps - these are pumps driven by the power of a children's roundabout which deliver clean water from underground aquifers. A look at the website http://www.onedifference.org/ explained a bit more about the company and it's quite a story. Since it's been going since 2004 you may well have heard of it so I won't repeat the facts which you can read on the website, but a couple of things did occur to me:

- more and more charity, particularly relating to developmental and environmental issues, is getting interwoven with business. As an example look at the plethora of Fair Trade type logos you see in the supermarkets; this is straightforward commerce but with an ethical twist. The time when all green and anti-poverty campaigning groups used to instinctively line up against "big business" and hated multi-nationals seems to have passed. They have seen the benefit of harnessing the power of capitalism for their own ends. Good to see for someone like me who is a free market capitalist through and through but is also acutely conscious of environmental and poverty issues.

- as a general rule I find bottled water annoying and in fact somewhat immoral. I cringe at the amount of money and resources that is wasted on packaging, advertising, transporting stuff that is no better than tap water. Certainly anyone with any pretensions of caring about the environment or global warming should not buy bottled water. Maybe I am missing something but it's a view I have always held. Now that I have found a bottled water which grew out of a great idea and supports a great objective I can soften my opinion. I will still only ever buy a bottle if I have to, but I will always look for the One label. You can like One water on Facebook too http://www.facebook.com/onedifference.

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Green riches will not materialise

I was delighted this week to get another article published by the prestigious Arab news portal and newspaper Alrroya:

Beware Greens Bearing Gifts

In it I take a sceptical look at all the optimistic claims made by Greens and politicians about the green economy. It has become accepted wisdom that moving to a low carbon economy will be good for jobs, growth and living standards whereas the opposite is probably true.

It recognises that there are economic gains to be made from energy conservation measures and that individual countries could do well if they become the most efficient and technically advanced in the new industries but on the whole the "greening" of the world's economies is more than likely going to be a long and expensive slog.

Barring the discovery of a miracle fuel or energy process, the move to renewables and the cost of the huge infrastrutcure investments required for the low carbon economy will mean higher prices and lower living standards. The net effect on jobs and growth could be neutral if resources are merely redirected to green projects from the rest of the economy but I suspect, knowing the track record of governments, that a lot of bad tax policy and clumsy state intervention will actually destroy jobs and reduce growth rates.

It might look on the surface like an anti-environmental , green bashing piece but actually I am very supportive of the green agenda. I hate the thoughtless waste of precious resources and destruction of our natural world. I fear for my children's economic future if we don't succeed in building an energy system which is not so heavily reliant on oil. I don't buy the whole global warming argument uncritically but it would be stupid to ignore the risks posed by ever increasing carbon emissions. Therefore we need green policies but just don't try selling them to me as an economic panacea.