Better off dead, or am I?

WARNING: This post is a bit of a rant!

This week I found out that the past year I have had a horrific carbon footprint, 84000 Kg CO2. I think it was the highest in the class. Let me put this number in perspective. Apparently (to be sustainable) every person on the plant would need to have a carbon footprint of 3000 Kg CO2 (Gill Seyfang). That means in the past year I consumed as much carbon as 28 people. I knew it was going to be big, and I know why it was big.

Approximately 80000 Kg CO2 were purely because of my job. I have spent the past two years working as a technology consultant for one of the Big 4 accounting firms in New York City. "Woo New York City YEAH BABY!" I hear you say! That's what I thought too! For me the reality of living in NYC wasn't as glamorous as the idea of living in NYC. Faced with terrible public transport, filthy crowded streets and an average working week of about 60-70 hours it wasn't much fun. Add on top of that the fact that I was based on a project in Tampa, Florida for 1 year and 4 months and the dream of living in NYC kind of faded.  So for almost a year and a half I flew down to Tampa on a Monday and flew back to NYC on a Friday.

The company I was working for claims to be a "Green Leader" in America, aiming to cut its carbon emissions by 20% by 2012. But the claims they make on their website regarding the actions they are taking to achieve this seem to completely contradict the action that I saw taking place in the office. On numerous occasions I tried to get involved with green initiatives that had been advertised, only to be told that they were no longer running or had never existed. I tried to provide ideas to the corporate responsibility group and was either ignored, or when I did get a reply I was told that the changes I had suggested would cost too much to implement and make too insignificant a difference (even simple things like changing to recycled toilet paper was apparently too much for the firm to handle). I later found out that the corporate responsibility group comprised of a single employee in Chicago who also had other responsibilities. With regards to my project, on a few occasions I asked why we weren't temporarily relocated nearer to the project or why local employees couldn't take over (we were based in our own company's office in Tampa). I was told that; the management that set up the project liked to earn the hotel points and air miles; we had a cheap deal with the local hotel; this was always how the project had worked; and that it was a New York Office project, so Tampa employees couldn't work on it. Not the sort of answers I expected from a "Green Leader".

If these are the sort of Green Leaders America is producing it's no wonder the country is the largest emitter on the planet. I have had no experience with corporate jobs in the rest of the world but I hope that companies do not use the company I worked for as a role model. So how do we know who is really making the right moves? Who is taking this challenge seriously?

Surely companies should be held accountable for the claims they are making, transparency is needed so we can determine the true champions from the fraudsters jumping on the green bandwagon. I used to just accept that whatever a well known company said was true, I no longer hold this trust.

Frustrated and disillusioned I quit my job to do this course and change my career. But has quiting my job really made any difference? To me personally, yes. To the emissions I was producing by being employed there, no. Someone else will have willingly taken my place and will, right this very moment, be emitting that CO2. And the company has thousands of projects all over the world, employing thousands of people and flying them thousands of miles. We need these companies to pledge more than just words and we need some way to monitor their progress, not trust them to audit themselves and believe they will do the right thing.

From my experience I can only conclude that only one green thing matters in corporate America and it is not the environment.

They also told me that they supported a healthy work-life balance!