How good should your business be?: How wonderful to think that you can make money and save the planet at the same time. “Doing well by doing good” has become a popular business mantra: the phrase conjures up a Panglossian best-of-all-possible-worlds, the idea that firms can be successful by acting in the broader interests of society as a whole even while they satisfy the narrow interests of shareholders. The noble sentiment will no doubt echo around the Swiss Alps next week as chief executives hobnob with political leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos. For these are high times for what is clunkingly called corporate social responsibility (CSR). No longer is it enough for annual reports to have a philanthropic paragraph about the charity committee; now companies put out long tracts full of claims about their fair trading and carbon neutralising. The Economist

Green dreams: Following planes and scooping up their emissions, making buildings out of carbon, weighing rubbish and getting staff on their bikes: these are just a few of the ideas that universities are coming up with to combat climate change, according to a report out today. It all sounds wonderful, but it’s hard to believe that this is the full picture. And, of course, it is not. The report, Greening Spires, is a showcase, put together by the lobby group for higher education, Universities UK, and it paints an extremely rosy picture of an academia gone crazy for greenness. There is no doubt that in some areas our academics are leading the world. Guardian

Rich countries grow at ecological expense of poor countries: The costs of environmental degradation caused by rich countries are disproportionately falling on the world’s poorest countries, reports an analysis published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Tallying the environmental costs of climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion, agricultural intensification and expansion, deforestation, overfishing, and mangrove conversion from human activities over 1961-2000, University of California Berkeley researchers led by Pacific Ecoinformatics lab scientist Dr. Thara Srinivasan found total damages ranged up to $47 trillion in net present value. More importantly, Srinivasan and colleagues show that environmental damages like climate change and ozone depletion have been “overwhelmingly driven” by emissions from middle- and high-income groups, but the impacts are disproportionately borne by low-income nations. Monga Bay

An oil giant’s green dream: If you filled your tank with gasoline today, or warmed your home with natural gas, there’s a decent chance you sent some money to Abu Dhabi. The capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is blessed with fossil fuels, including the fourth-biggest reserves of oil in the world. Selling that petroleum at record prices has helped Abu Dhabi achieve the highest per-capita GDP in the world — wealth that’s visible in every luxury hotel rising from the desert or spotless Mercedes prowling the streets. All those fossil fuels also mean that Abu Dhabi citizens have among the biggest carbon footprints in the world, and the emirate’s exports are a big, if indirect, contribution to global climate change. Time

Pollution rearranging ocean currents: Scientists have found that rising levels of man-made pollution – mostly in the northern hemisphere – have affected worldwide ocean circulation, and may even affect rainfall in southern Australia. A CSIRO team studying human-generated aerosols found they caused a cooling of the northern hemisphere’s oceans, while those below the equator continue to warm. This pushes the ocean circulation system further south, as the global water “conveyor belt” redistributes heat from the south to the north to compensate for ocean temperature differences. The Age