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This chapter shows that although American environmental groups had little success in influencing federal energy policies, they contributed to a significant increase in local demand for renewable energy. The chapter shows how environmental groups shape organizations' decisions to purchase green power. Many environmental groups offer crucial mobilizing resources for green‐power champions. Others act as brokers who connect organizations with renewable energy developers or utilities, as certification agents who verify the purchase of renewable energy certificates (RECs), or as organizers of protests, boycotts, or shareholder activism. The analysis demonstrates that, while environmental groups and activists can sometimes pressure organizations to change “from the outside” through protests, boycotts, and lawsuits, their most significant impact is through creating change “from the inside.” In the case of colleges and universities, national and local environmental groups have pushed for green‐power purchases both bottom‐up, by organizing student campaigns for clean energy, and top‐down, by coordinating a network of college and university presidents who are committed to addressing climate change. In the case of companies, environmental groups have pushed for green‐power purchases mostly from the center by offering resources to mid‐level employees and environmental managers.

This chapter examines the recent developments in climate policy in Australia, with a specific focus on the recently introduced legislation for emissions trading in Australia. It also considers the newly implemented mandatory greenhouse and energy reporting regulations, which provide detail on the mandatory corporate greenhouse emissions and energy reporting scheme, and the design proposals for an expanded national renewable energy target. The chapter concludes by considering some recent developments in the voluntary carbon market in Australia, including the investigation by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) into ‘green’ marketing.

Chapter Five discusses the complementary shift that is under way from the linear economy, with its wasteful resource practices, to a Circular Economy where everything is recycled. The prevailing model is based on a linear process starting at one end capturing natural materials and, at the other, dumping the wastes again in the sink called “nature”. But we know that the biosphere works according to great cycles or recirculation of materials, where wastes from one process become nutrients for another. The capitalist version of this involves eco-linkages, where one firm’s waste products become another's inputs, and entrepreneurial activity is focused on discovering and implementing such eco-initiatives. The Chinese call this a “Circular Economy” and it is already embodied in the country’s current12th Five Year Plan. The circular economy provides a template for the green economy – and the default option for the resource system of a global green capitalism.

The region including China's Yunnan Province, northern Laos, and northern Thailand, best known as the Golden Triangle, has been globalized for a long time. This chapter focuses on constructing narratives of the different actors in one sector's rural economy—tea cultivation and processing—to examine how they are making decisions to securing and improve their livelihoods in response to the changing economic, political, and social dynamics of globalization. Although “official landscapes” comprise extensive tracts of intensively cultivated monocultures of tea, significant areas have a diverse patchwork of crops, including gardens of old, scattered tea trees grown for generations, primarily by ethnic minority communities. As demand for rare teas has soared, “forest tea” growers are challenging established categories of modern” and “advanced” in the discourse of development in China, showing themselves to be far more attuned to the subtleties of global marketing than official planners and development agencies. Entry into the world market has transformed “backward minorities” of the Six Ancient Tree Mountains into entrepreneurs defining the cutting edge of green marketing. This chapter explores how a land use formerly ignored or dismissed as backward has been recast as a sustainable, indigenous technology for the production of a marketable niche product.

This chapter discusses the continued production of viscose rayon, suggesting that it may not disappear from our everyday lives anytime soon despite the emergence of new knowledge about the toxicity of carbon disulfide. Viscose was a pacesetter at the start of the twentieth century, the first major synthetic-fiber success story. Even as rayon went offline in much of Europe and North America in the last decades of the twentieth century, carbon disulfide is still very much a part of an ongoing and indeed expanding viscose-manufacturing industry. Indeed, carbon disulfide has made another comeback, not through pharmaceuticals but via agribusiness. Both viscose rayon and cellophane have retained a symbolic presence in society. Viscose remain very much in existence, thanks to technological innovation and savvy green marketing. Today rayon is marketed as an eco-friendly, nearly green product. As Halston aptly expressed in an advertisement made for ITT Rayonier, Inc., “Rayon. It's going to be with us a long, long time”.