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Trade-offs that help save our planet are worth every penny
March 31, 2010
By Pierre Ouillet, Special to the Sun
A few weeks ago, I heard David Suzuki speak at the Walmart Green Business Summit in Vancouver (yes, you read correctly, Walmart and David Suzuki now belong to the same sentence -funny how times change).
Great speech. Remarkably supportive business audience ... until Suzuki started to challenge the concept of triple bottom-line (environmental, social and financial).
“Making trade-offs does not make any sense,” he said.
“Why would you compromise the very future of the planet you live on by making financial trade-offs?”
Trade-offs?
This week, the University of British Columbia committed itself to some extraordinary greenhouse-gas emission targets: a 33-per-cent reduction by 2015, a 67-per-cent reduction by 2020, and complete elimination by 2050.
These figures are all the more impressive knowing that UBC has already picked the low-hanging fruit in meeting its Kyoto targets despite a 30 per cent growth in student population.
