Earth Hour – Ed sums it up
“Earth Hour is shaping up to be an impressive symbolic response to our planet in peril”.
This was the headline comment from Ed Miliband, climate change secretary, just before Saturday’s global ‘lights off’ at 20:30 local time across the world.
With the G20 summit taking place this week to deliver Gordon Brown from the clutches of mediocrity, no comment more succinctly sums up what is, in all likelihood, the general response from around the political world to the challenge the global economy faces from reducing carbon resource and increasing levels of CO2 in our atmosphere.
It is a comment which crystallises what response we can expect from our political leaders to a crisis that is building to a sea change in the way we not only transact business and place a future value on production and productivity but also how the electorate (and don’t forget that they are also your workforce, Messrs CEO and CFO) will live their lives on a day-to-day basis in the not-too-distant future.
This is hardly a surprise, however. With the UN climate conference in Copenhagen later this year shaping up to be yet another political statement of intent instead of a declaration of immediate action, it still falls to the business community to take the initiative, something we in business have proven to be very good at when there is profit to be made; how good can we be when the very survival of our business model is at stake?
The link is not lost on all politicians; ahead of Copenhagen, Connie Hedegaard, Denmark’s Minister of Climate and Energy is quoted as saying “We, the politicians of the world, have a responsibility to reach a truly global climate change agreement in Copenhagen in December 2009. But it is the business society that can deliver the tools to turn our vision into reality. Businesses can provide the clever solutions to make it possible to live in a both modern and sustainable society.”
It’ll take more than switching the lights off for an hour, though. It’ll also take a change in attitude. On the day of Barrack Obama’s arrival in the UK, amid warnings of civil unrest, city workers in London were advised by their own employers to come to work in ‘civvies’ so as not to attract unwanted attention from the protesters; some, who were interviewed by the media in all their pin-striped glory, made their position clear, however - no tree hugger is going to bully us into slowing our pursuit of the mighty greenback. Hurrah for the war spirit of old Blighty!
Except this isn’t the Blitz in the ‘good old days’ sense of the word. We are dropping the bomb on ourselves this time… and it is a time bomb with a very short fuse. As responsible and intelligent business leaders and employers, we should be taking the lead and letting our people know they no longer need to trot out the mantra of the noughties.
Earth Hour was just that; an hour. It’ll take more than an hour to fix things and no amount of political waffle will start the process. Protests in the street are also not the answer, but until we actually DO something you can’t actually blame them, can you?
