Damned if you do. Damned if you don't.

Having penned my initial feelings about Tesco's announcement of a £100 million fund to cut carbon emissions and increase energy efficiency, it has been interesting to see how it has been received. And on balance, so far it has panned out quite predictably.

The general mood across the 'green lobby' (the composition of which I am a little unsure, but seems, unsurprisingly, to be mainly those activist organisations with well-developed access to the media. It is important, as ‘they’ do seem to be allowed to speak for ‘us’) seems to have been cool, though in many ways not as cool as I'd imagined.

But some pols are happy. With, for instance Liberal Democrat spokesman on the environment, Chris Huhne MP, making a fair point that the amount committed by the supermarket was double the £50 million the Government had allocated to micro generation in its budget. 

I am currently ambivalent. For sure, 'every little bit helps', and £100m out of profits of £2billion is not that much when you look at what else gets 'invested’ in.

There is also the small matter of the balance between what helps them out (wind turbines do, eventually, reduce power consumption... and costs) and what is of any tangible end benefit to me as a shopper (though as a person living in the same county as several, reducing environmental impact is always a plus).

 

I just wonder how much impact we are going to see on what we get presented on the shelves, and spend our one in eight pounds on with every visit to the supermarket.