Not Using Fossil Fuels is Better Than Technopostivism

- Adam Clare
Phramacy

The COP26 news coverage has focussed on pledges from counties to cut their emissions (which is good) and on funding for new technologies to suck carbon out of the air (which isn’t so good). Increasingly scientists, ecologists, and activists have been calling out that technical solutions are a distraction from the core problem: we’re burning up fossil fuels. Technology won’t save us, cutting greenhouse gas emissions to zero will.

This isn’t to say we shouldn’t research carbon capture technologies, rather we should prioritize not putting more carbon into the air in the first place. Leave the oil in the ground, stop all coal consumption, and ban the production of fossil fuel powered engines.

“Simply put, technological carbon capture is a dangerous distraction,” they wrote. “We don’t need to fix fossil fuels, we need to ditch them.”

Despite these groups’ concerns, we’re likely to be bombarded with more good-news climate stories like the coverage accorded to the plant in Merritt and the project in Iceland. And carbon capture, utilization, and storage is a key component of Canada and B.C.’s plans for reducing overall emissions.

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The report acknowledges that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s future scenarios allow for the deployment of carbon-capture technologies from the air in achieving the Paris targets.

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High CEO Pay Reduces Customer Satisfaction

- Adam Clare

The more a CEO is paid the worst customers are treated. Everyone knows inequality is bad for our society, but now shareholders might start caring because inequality within companies produces negative results. Customers are less satisfied with companies with high CEO compensations, and internally the companies suffer from inefficiency and lower morale.

This article adopts a marketing perspective to examine how wage inequality between top managers and their employees may have customer-related consequences (i.e., customer-directed effort, customer-directed opportunism, and customer-oriented culture) that affect customer satisfaction and firm performance. Surprisingly, marketing scholars and practitioners have largely neglected this pressing societal issue. The authors collect a cross-industry, multisource data set, including responses by top-level managers and objective data on wage inequality and firm performance from 106 business-to-business-focused firms (Study 1). In addition, they analyze multisource longitudinal panel data covering 521 firm-year observations for business-to-consumer-focused firms (Study 2). The results consistently reveal that wage inequality harms customer satisfaction. This relationship is mediated by customer-directed opportunism and customer-oriented culture but not customer-directed effort. Moreover, while wage inequality has a positive direct effect on short-term firm profitability, this effect is dampened by the negative indirect effect through customer-related consequences and customer satisfaction. Importantly, the positive direct effect of wage inequality on short-term profitability vanishes in the long run, whereas the adverse effect through customer satisfaction persists, leading to a nonsignificant total effect on long-term profitability. These findings may guide researchers, managers, shareholders, and policy makers in addressing the challenge of rising wage inequality.

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Roasting Coffee by the Rays of the Sun

- Adam Clare
coffee

In Italy your next cup of coffee may come from a solar roaster instead of an unsustainable source. Climate change is threatening the ability of coffee plants to survive, as a result the entire industry may not exist by the end of the century. This has got smaller players in the industry (not the mega corporations) to explore new ways to process coffee from plant to cup.

A roasters the size of a tennis court can roast coffee using only the rays of the sun, making it incredibly efficient. The only high tech aspect of the whole operation are a few microchips and servos to move the mirrors

The process isn’t only environmentally friendly and economically convenient. According to Durbe and Tummei, it also better preserves the coffee’s aroma, giving it a richer flavor. Unlike conventional hot air ovens, which are typically gas-powered, the concentrated sunlight roasts the coffee without heating the air around it — by penetrating the grains in a more uniform way and without burning the exterior.

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Taxing Sugar Drinks Works if the Tax is Known

- Adam Clare

beer

Soda taxes get proposed often, and they have varying levels of success depending on how they are implemented. A new study reveals that when people are made aware that the sugar tax impacts the price of products they stop buying the unhealthy product. If you educate people then they act on that knowledge. One way to remind people about the health impact of consumer food products is on their bill.

But the share of sugary drinks purchased did decline slightly (45%) when the tags mentioned the price included the added tax.

Results showed that most consumers who chose to avoid sugary drinks with the added tax chose a drink that was not subject to the tax.

“Consumers are averse to taxes, so when they learn that their favorite drink has this sugary beverage tax, some are less interested in buying it,” Donnelly said.

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Even Bees Practice Social Distancing

- Adam Clare

Pandemics happen often in the animal world, and not even little insects can avoid them. Researchers have discovered that one of the greatest creatures on the Earth, the humble bumble bee, practices social distancing during a pandemic. By keeping far apart it reduces the likelihood of other members of the group getting infected and prolonging the suffering of the whole. Bees figured this out thousands of years ago. That’s right even beings as small as the bee are smarter than anti-maskers.

Social insects are particularly vulnerable to pathogens and parasites owing to the dense network of contacts among highly related nestmates and the large amounts of food stored in a nest under relatively stable environmental conditions (1). To counteract disease pressure, social insects have evolved, in addition to individual immune responses, many forms of social immunity, i.e., strategies based on the cooperation of the individual group members (2). The latter occur at the behavioral, physiological, and organizational level and can act synergistically to avoid invasion, establishment, and replication of pathogens or parasites inside the colony (2, 3).

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Here’s why social distancing is important for humans too:
Covid-19 Transmission graphic

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