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Green America Rolls Out Handy Chocolate Scorecard

by CoyHargrove Posted on October 25, 2019

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Lindt. Nestle. Hershey. Divine. Godivia. Alter Eco. Equal Exchange.

You have plenty of luscious options when selecting chocolate treats. With that wide selection is a rich opportunity to wield your spending power and reward firms that support environmental responsibility and fair labor practices for farmers.

Maybe you’re browsing for Halloween. Or you’re on the prowl for a scrumptious personal indulgence.

Green America, a nonprofit organization that focuses on economic action for social justice and environmental sustainability, encourages choosing wisely when buying chocolate. Especially if it involves links with child labor. And deforestation.

“It is an ideal product for voting with our dollars,” says Todd Larsen, executive co-director of Consumer and Corporate Engagement for Green America. “We can choose to purchase from brands that are working to build farmer income, address child labor, and promote ecological farming practices.”

Green America’s Chocolate Scorecard

Green America’s fresh ranking of chocolate companies features report-card grades, with emphasis on labor and environmental factors.

The scorecard is designed as a valuable resource for discriminating shoppers who appreciate information about ethical sourcing practices in products they purchase.

Green America Chocolate Scorecard. Source: GreenAmerica.org

Labor certifications, including Fairtrade, IMO Fair for Life, and UTZ, were factored into each brand’s ranking. (See more certifications and what they mean on Green America’s website.) Other factors, including efforts to support farmers — especially in West Africa — rounded out the scores.

“… we are not only looking at how much certified cocoa a major chocolate company has, we are also looking to see if the company has innovative programs and projects in place to address some of the other underlying issues of child labor in cocoa and if the company is working to address deforestation,” Green America’s website states.

Focusing on eliminating farmer poverty interconnects with and assists in resolving other social and environmental issues, according to Charlotte Tate, labor justice manager at Green America.

Harvesting cacao. Image: Adobe Stock

Examples of chocolate companies’ noteworthy programs and practices include:

Divine: 44 percent ownership by a farmers cooperative in Ghana
Alter Eco: investing in agroforestry, which integrates cacao with other crops for a healthy and diverse ecosystem, and offers additional produce and revenue for farmers
Endangered Species: donates 10 percent of profits to animals, habitat, and humanity

The Rankings

Firms leading the pack with grade A rankings include

Alter Eco
Divine
Equal Exchange
Endangered Species
Shaman
Theo Chocolate
Tony’s Chocolonely

Check out your favorite chocolate’s ranking in Green America’s scorecard. Photo by Pete Wright on Unsplash

Green America points out it did not include every chocolate company in its rankings, and notes that many of the A-rated firms are members of Green America’s Green Business Network of “socially and environmentally responsible businesses.”

Mars, Nestle, Hershey, and Lindt earned middle rankings.

Godiva received an F.

Green America’s website features a separate page offering extra information about the scores, including Godiva’s.

“Godiva has stated on its website that it has a goal of sourcing 100 percent sustainable cocoa by 2020. It has not indicated which certifications it is sourcing from, what progress it is making with this goal, or what additional steps it is taking to address child labor and farmer income. While its competitors publish annual reports on their progress, Godiva only reports minimal information on its website.”

Earth911 emailed a Godiva spokeswoman about its Green America grade, and she issued a quick reply.

“GODIVA condemns forced labor or any practice that exploits, endangers, or harms people, especially children. We do not own farms and purchase our cocoa through third parties, which puts us at a distinct disadvantage on scorecards such as these that don’t allow for an accurate representation of our longstanding commitment to people and planet. We ensure ethical sourcing through agreements with our suppliers to comply with our GODIVA Code of Conduct, which explicitly prohibits the use of forced and child labor.”

Let chocolate manufacturers know that you support environmental responsibility and fair labor practices. Photo by amirali mirhashemian on Unsplash

Speaking Out

While thoughtfully directing your dollars is a powerful tool to support preferred products, perhaps you’ll want to add fuel to your position.

Write a note directly to the firms you’re supporting or avoiding, explaining why you decided to purchase — or not purchase — their products.

Another route is signing a petition, such as Green America’s request to Godiva: “… share your progress with the public through a corporate responsibility report on your website that makes your progress on farmer income, child labor, and environmental protection fully transparent.”

Feature image by Security from Pixabay 

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Continued: 

Green America Rolls Out Handy Chocolate Scorecard

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California is preparing for a weekend of wintertime wildfires.

by CoyHargrove Posted on December 15, 2017

Forests in the American West are having a harder time recovering from wildfires because of (what else?) climate change, according to new research published in Ecology Letters.

Researchers measured the growth of seedlings in 1,500 wildfire-scorched areas in Colorado, Wyoming, Washington, Idaho, and Montana. Across the board, they found “significant decreases” in tree regeneration, a benchmark for forest resilience. In one-third of the sites, researchers found zero seedlings.

The warmest, driest forests were hit especially hard.

“Seedlings are more sensitive to warm, dry conditions than mature trees, so if the right conditions don’t exist within a few years following a wildfire, tree seedlings may not establish,” said Philip Higuera, a coauthor of the study.

Earlier this month, a separate study found that ponderosa pine and pinyon forests in the West are becoming less resilient due to droughts and warmer temperatures. Researchers told the New York Times that as trees disappear, some forests could shift to entirely different ecosystems, like grasslands or shrublands.

You’d think the rapid reconfiguration of entire ecosystems would really light a fire under us to deal with climate change, wouldn’t you?

Read article here: 

California is preparing for a weekend of wintertime wildfires.

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I Am Being Followed By an Army of Twitter Lady Bots

by CoyHargrove Posted on October 22, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

I’ve been making a real effort to be better at Twitter lately. I’ve been tweeting more, striking a conversational tone, and trying to “just be myself,” like people who know more about Twitter than me told me to. So I was thrilled this week when my follower count zoomed up from 3,030 to 3,066 over the course of just a few days. My efforts must have paid off, I thought.

But then, I looked at my new followers. They all seemed pretty annoying. IN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY. Check it out:

“Hipster-friendly music practitioner”? “Total travel advocate”? “Beer practitioner”? Ew!

The formula for the handles seems to be: first name, middle initial, last name. And the bio items look like they’re generated from a list of bland hobbies and jobs or something. All over the backdrop of some irrelevant stock art.

Here are some of their tweets:

Creepy Twitter lady bots, what do you want from me?

Source:

I Am Being Followed By an Army of Twitter Lady Bots

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Why on Earth Are Argentine Bonds So Hot Right Now?

by CoyHargrove Posted on July 28, 2014

Mother Jones

What’s the hottest ticket in the global bond market right now? That’s right: Argentine bonds. They’re on a tear. But why? Didn’t Argentina just lose—once and for all—its court case against vulture funds who own old Argentine bonds and are refusing to accept partial payment of the kind that everyone else accepted after Argentina’s default a decade ago?

Why yes, they did lose. Argentina now has to pay the vulture funds—which is politically unthinkable for any Argentine politician who wants to avoid being tarred and feathered—or else it has to default on all its bonds, including the restructured “exchange” bonds that it issued in 2005. So why are these exchange bonds becoming more valuable? Argentina has always been willing to pay those bonds, so it’s not as if the court ruling has made default less likely. The risk of default was already close to nil. So what’s up?

Felix Salmon, having gotten tired of financial journalists offering up bizarre theories to explain this, tells us today that it’s probably all simpler than it seems. In fact, the odds of default have gotten higher, just as logic dictates, but this might actually be a good thing for bondholders. Normally, he points out, there’s no upside to bonds: you get the coupon payment, but you never get anything more. In Argentina’s case, however, that might not be true.

First off, there’s something called a RUFO clause. This means that if Argentina does eventually settle with the vulture funds, it has to offer the same deal to all the other bondholders.

Obviously, Argentina doesn’t have the money to pay out the exchange bondholders in full according to that clause. But if Argentina is paying out billions of dollars to vultures who deserve much less than they’re getting, and if those payments create a massive parallel legal obligation to the bondholders who cooperated with the country and did everything they asked, then it’s not unreasonable to expect that Argentina might end up paying something to the exchange bondholders, if doing so would wipe out any RUFO obligations.

Then there are interest payments:

The second way that exchange bondholders could get more than 100 cents on the dollar is, paradoxically, if there is a default. The minute that Argentina goes into arrears on its coupon payments, the clock starts ticking. From that day onwards — and actually, that day has been and gone already — bondholders are owed not only those coupon payments but interest on those coupon payments. And the interest accrues at the standard statutory rate of 8% — a massive number, these days.

So there you have it: a paradoxical case in which bonds might be viewed as more valuable if the odds of default are higher. Salmon admits that he’s just speculating here, since no one knows for sure why the market is so hot for Argentine bonds in the wake of Argentina losing its court case. But this is at least a reasonable guess. And a fascinating one.

See the article here – 

Why on Earth Are Argentine Bonds So Hot Right Now?

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UN Climate Chief Calls for Tripling of Clean Energy Investment

by CoyHargrove Posted on January 14, 2014

green4us

Christiana Figueres says $1 trillion a year is required for the transformation needed to stay within 2C of warming. Video produced by Tim McDonnell, Climate Desk. The United Nations climate chief has urged global financial institutions to triple their investments in clean energy to reach the $1 trillion a year mark that would help avert a climate catastrophe. In an interview with the Guardian, the UN’s Christiana Figueres urged institutions to begin building the foundations of a clean energy economy by scaling up their investments. Global investment in clean technologies is running at about $300bn a year – but that is nowhere where it needs to be, Figueres said. “From where we are to where we need to be, we need to triple, and we need to do that – over the next five to 10 years would be best – but certainly by 2030,” she said. The International Energy Agency said four years ago it would take $1tn a year in new infrastructure projects by 2030 to make the shift from acoal- and oil-based economy to the cleaner fuels and technologies that would help keep warming below the dangerous threshold of 2C. But investment has lagged far behind. “What we need to have invested in the energy sector and in the green infrastructure in order to make the transformation that we need in order to stay within 2C is one trillion dollars a year and we are way, way behind that,” Figueres said. Figueres and leading Wall Street figures will urge global investors to step up their clean energy investments at a meeting at the UN on Wednesday organised by the Ceres investment network. The biggest investors – pension funds, insurance companies, foundations and investment managers – control about $76tn in assets, according to OECD figures. But by Figueres’s estimate, those institutional investors were committing less than 2% of the funds under their control to clean energy infrastructure – compared to 10% or 15% that was still going into coal and oil. “Last year, we had $300bn, and in the same year we had double that amount invested in exploration and mining in fossil fuels. So you can see that the ratio is not where it needs to be. We need to be at the opposite ratio.” The UN climate official said she hoped to make her case by showing the opportunities in clean tech investment – but also the financial risks of sticking with coal and oil. The UN’s climate panel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said for the first time in its blockbuster climate report last September that there was a finite amount of carbon that could be burnt to stay within 2C warming. About half of that carbon budget is already spent – which means much of the remaining coal and oil can not be burned without crossing into dangerous warming. “There is no doubt that most of the fossil fuel reserves we have world-wide will have to stay in the ground” to avoid warming beyond 2C, Figueres said. “Two-thirds of the fossil fuels we have will have to stay in the ground.” She argued those realities would eventually erode the value of oil and coal holdings. Climate experts have already taken to referring to such carbon stores as “stranded assets”. “There is study after study coming out saying beware we are invested in assets that are already and will soon be losing value,” she said. Diplomats hope this week’s investor summit will energise efforts to reach a global emissions-cutting deal in 2015. The gathering is the first of a number of big climate-themed gatherings set for 2014, culminating with an invitation to world leaders by the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, to a summit in September to try to get the outlines of that deal in place. In Washington, meanwhile, Barack Obama is expected to finalise new limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants – a critical step if the US is to reach its pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions 17% by 2020. But global investment is still not keeping place. Bloomberg New Energy Finance put global investment in clean technology at just $281bn in 2012 – and the figures for 2013, due for release at the investor summit on Wednesday, are expected to fall even lower. That would mean a quadrupling of clean tech investment – instead of the tripling in investment that Figueres estimates. “Cost competitive renewable technologies and attractive investment opportunities exist right now, but we’re still not seeing clean energy deployment at the scale we need to put a dent in climate change,” said Mindy Lubber, the president of Ceres, which organised this week’s summit. “We need to find a way to get more institutional investor capital into this space.”

Originally posted here – 

UN Climate Chief Calls for Tripling of Clean Energy Investment

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UN Climate Chief Calls for Tripling of Clean Energy Investment

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