He also stressed that that this challenge could be an exciting opportunity to become involved in a new technological revolution to rival the industrial revolution. It is disappointing that his lecture was given just before the start of the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change and that much of the content of his lecture referenced the critical importance of a substantive accord coming out of COP15 (which, as we now know, never happened).

2010 kicked off with the CBI adding its own concerns to the growing list of those who have seen the writing on the wall for UK industry if things don’t change. The CBI’s ‘climate change tracker‘ - a set of 24 targets against which it measures the UK’s performance showed that the country is on track with just four of these targets - improving the planning system, supporting new nuclear power, moving forward on the EU emissions trading scheme and taking steps to reduce the impact of the aviation and shipping industries… and that’s it.

Richard Lambert, CBI director-general, commented “Following the disappointing outcome to the Copenhagen negotiations, the immediate emphasis must now be on those actions that don’t require global agreement and that bring economic benefits in their own right.” He went on to say that improved energy efficiency can take us a long way towards meeting our commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, whilst bringing significant economic benefits to the country.

So the scientist (Lord Stern) and the industrialist (Richard Lambert) both agree on the same points; we are doing too little, in the knowledge that a lot more is possible and will actually benefits the economy financially through savings, and we have an opportunity to create a thriving and profitable, as well as ecologically necessary, new business stream in the green tech and build sector.

Considering the fact that somewhere in the region of £15m a day is being wasted on energy by businesses and households, every day, you might think that we would all be doing our ‘bit’; but we’re not. The politicians are doing just enough to ensure that they cannot be too harshly criticised for not getting with the programme but their actions are relatively insignificant and piecemeal. And the commercial sector is still either waiting for guidance and leadership from Westminster or else are largely ‘playing’ at being green by issuing environmental statements in their annual reports - statements that are coming under greater scrutiny now by both consumers/clients and regulatory bodies alike.

What still appears to be missing is the relatively clear and straightforward understanding that reducting carbon emissions is a cost control strategy as much as an environmental consideration. It is also true that, with the added pressure of trading out of the last recession, this is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’ but a ‘need-to-do’ strategy.

With the new year starting to pick up speed, we are already wasting time by not grasping the opportunity to make this a decade of decisive action toward creating a robust and sustainable economy and it would be interesting to hear why businesses are still not actually doing something in favour of just talking about something.

A more dramatic and, for those of us who remain somewhat wary of any suggestions coming out of Iran, more radical solution was proposed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Now, before we dismiss his proposals, let’s reflect on his proposed solution to the current climate crisis, which was two-pronged.

First, he said that all countries should re-direct 10% of their military spend into a global environmental fund, which would dwarf the financial figures discussed at the conference.

Aside from the fact that many of the developed nations have their defence budgets tied up in wars/conflicts in areas that may lead the cynics to deduce that they are about securing foreign oil supplies and that Iran would very likely welcome a defence reduction by those states that might block future insurgency plans that it may have, it’s actually not a bad suggestion.

Second, Ahmadinejad said that restrictions on the deployment of nuclear energy should be loosened so that almost all states had access to this ‘clean’ form of energy, allowing fossil fuels to be used for other purposes such as producing pharmaceuticals and other useful products. Again, a great suggestion as long as we don’t interpret his proposal as being one that is designed to take the spotlight away from Iran’s hidden agenda (if that’s what it is) to build it’s own nuclear arsenal.

And that’s the problem here. Both suggestions have much to recommend them; the issue lies with the person tabling these proposals.

However, on the strength of the results from our own Lord Mandie, perhaps more thought should be put into realising the benefits of the Iran proposals. After all, whether we like it or not, carbon fuels are on the decline, prices are already rising (if somewhat insidiously) and we are fast approaching a day when nuclear energy needs to become a major contributor to our energy requirements in a way that France has already realised and acted upon (accounting, as it does, for about 78% of the country’s electrical power production). As a business owner, I need to know that the energy I require to fuel my business will not only be there, but will be affordable… and nuclear appears to be one of the solutions. Fail to engage with this issue at your peril.

The questions, then, is “where’s the business sense?”

COP15 may not have been a great success but it did illustrate the point that change will only come about by the will and actions of the commercial sector; the politicians will deliberate and prevaricate until the oil runs out, the forests are meadows and there’s not a drop of freshwater left. We in the business community, however, do not have that luxury; long before any of those eventualities come to pass (and, with appropriate actions they need never come to pass at all), we will be faced with energy costs that may make our current businesses uncompetitive and thus redundant. It’s a simple case of demand and supply.

Ruth Spellman, chief executive of CMI, was shocked with the results of her organisation’s survey. I’m not sure why, unless she is so out of touch with her membership as to make her redundant. Whilst the ‘old guard’ of senior managers remain in post, little is likely to happen. The old guard are too young to remember the war and too old to be able to understand the expanded meaning of sustainability. The younger generation of managers have grown up in age where pay-for-use makes more sense than ownership and have been educated (NOT indoctrinated, as the cynics would have it) in the finite nature of our resource base. They have watched their parents’ generation live to excess in the honey years whilst the zeitgeist comedy was provided by ‘loadsamoney’.

The CMI is calling for all UK organisations to have a green management team in place and active, by 5 June 2010 - World Environment Day… which is nice, but doesn’t even come close to what is actually required. I have worked with organisations that have ‘green teams’ and it’s not pleasant; junior and middle managers marginalised in the cause of satisfying shareholders and customers with green spin whilst the organisation continues on its profligate commercial path.

The real cause for concern is that those managers who are currently passing up the ranks may not achieve the senior management stratosphere in time to make the changes that are necessary; if they do not, they may take up the directorial mantle at a point when any action will only slightly mitigate the damage that has already been done and their careers and reputations may be diminished as a result of the (in)actions of their predecessors.

That would not only be morally reprehensible; it might also mean that the extremist predictions so graphically illustrated in “The Age of Stupid” have a better than even chance of becoming a reality, or a close version of it.

They did, however, agree to make improvements to their electricity grid. The scheme to do this will cost about $3.4bn to the government and is backed by around $8bn of industry investment. This is a country that annually spends over $600bn on defence and over $2 trillion per year on healthcare. The most telling comment about this drop-in-the-ocean expenditure commitment (don’t forget, they haven’t spent it yet) came from analysis by the Electric Power Research Institute which estimates that the implementation of smart grid technologies will only reduce electricity use by some 4% by… 2030 - too little, too late.

Possibly the most damning statement by a representative of the United States throughout 2009 came at the end of the year; in fact, it was made at the Copenhagen Climate Conference. At a packed press conference in Copenhagen, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, launched her speech with the sound bite: ‘It’s all about the jobs’. Colleagues went on to say developing a low carbon economy was about weaning the country off foreign oil supplies and therefore protecting national security.

And that pretty much sums up the contribution to this most pressing of issues from the US delegation; it’s about jobs, national security and tokenism. We should not be surprised by this, however. Towards the end of last I reported on the infighting going at the US Chamber of Commerce, where the climate change deniers had been shown up by a spoof video put up on YouTube (Agnostics and Deniers) and there are still those in the USA who, like the creationists, continue to loudly deny the science of the Stern Report and the numerous reports issued by the IPCC.

So, as we enter a new decade – one that holds the promise of green-tech opportunities as well as the threats of carbon fuel and freshwater poverty – perhaps the business community in the UK should set the stage by not only holding politicians accountable for the green measures they have promised but also by taking the initiative and implementing carbon reduction strategies wholesale and utilising the savings by investing in the green tech sector.

As a business community, we took longer than most countries to come out of this latest recession; very likely because we have decimated our manufacturing base over the past 20 years. This decade we have the opportunity to redress this balance, thereby not only making the economy more resistant to another crash (which will doubtless follow in a smaller timescale than the gap between the last two) but also lead the way in sustainable business.

2009 saw the premiere of “The Age of Stupid” which achieved nothing more than Pete Postlethwaite threatening to hand back his OBE and putting a fresh-faced Energy & Climate Secretary, Ed Miliband, on the spot and making him look a fool (not good politics!).

2009 saw the publication of “Natural Capitalism: creating the next industrial revolution” (P.Hawkin, A.Lovins, L.H.Lovins), which proposed an economy based on scarcity of natural resources.

And 2009 ended with COP15, the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Heralded as the ‘do-or-die’ of all climate change conferences, it will go down in the annals for just two things; the fact that nothing was achieved as the conference allowed itself to be derailed by procedural queries and challenges and the fact that the conferences was responsible for a total carbon footprint of over 45,000 tonnes!

So what can we look forward to in 2010? Well, politically, the reality is that with a general election looming at the half year point, electioneering has already begun in earnest and all we can reasonably expect for the next few months are sound bites.

Alistair Darling’s pre-budget report back in 2009 has yet to bear any fruit and with the economy struggling to recover, it’s a safe bet that most of our money will go to further shoring up our banks this year to create a recovery curve that Labour hopes will get them re-elected and permit Gordon Brown once more to don his ‘super-hero’ of the crash cape.

The Tories have set their stall out by declaring that they may scrap the whole Thames Gateway regeneration scheme, if elected, blaming everything on Labour’s creation of a recession… so no good green news there then!

What the year is shaping up to be, then, is one where something will HAVE to follow from COP15 as a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. What the year is shaping up to be is one where the business community will get closer to a point where environmental considerations come from need rather than desire, as carbon resource poverty becomes a clearer reality.

2010 may well be the year that that the business community takes the lead in the absence of anyone else. If so, this could be a good year. The weather alone has already got some companies thinking about transport infrastructure weaknesses and different ways of working as employees struggle to get into work in the north of the country. And with financial debacles like Dubai City, it is only a matter of time before oil prices are used as a means of recouping sand dune losses. In the meantime, I’ll be happy to keep you informed as we leave the ‘noughties’ and enter the whatever this decade will eventually be tagged as!

The conference was about half way up the mountain at that point, everybody was queuing up for the cable car, and “the rest of the ride is going to be fast, smooth and relaxing”.

That was before the world leaders turned earlier this week and any chance of any kind of consensus that could be taken away from the Conference dissolved into another pipe dream as China took a back seat, not wishing to be forced into a major investment agreement on the back off their class-leading emissions record (!), the presidency of conference was switched at the last moment creating widespread confusion and the third world and emerging economies all complained the rich, developed nations should be offering more financial support… and will the USA ever ratify their agreement to the Kyoto Protocol, never mind make a significant contribution to what everyone agrees are ‘do-or-die’ talks?

Based on the events of the last week, I would have to admit that my previous scepticism was well founded; even Ed Miliband, who up to this point has only ever uttered relatively weak party-line platitudes, gave vent to his frustrations, commenting “It would be a tragedy if we failed to agree because of the substance but it would be a farce if we failed to agree because of the process.”

So what lessons are we to take away from COP15? Well, I don’t think its rocket science and I believe that all of us in the business community knew that this outcome was predictable, but in a nutshell:

·         Whilst a substantial disparity continues to exist between the wealth of the ‘super nations’ and the rest, you will never get an agreement on funding… for whatever purpose.
·         Whilst all nations still look at the planet in terms of a globally segregated resource allotment area, every nation will, in practice, ignore the needs of the whole until, and only until, they have stripped every last grain of nutrient out of their own soil. These are not business people; they are political animals who genuinely believe that their role is to argue for the perceived short-term desires of their own economies in order to secure re-election.
And
·         Whilst there is even one small voice that challenges the credibility of the sums and the science, they will continue to talk but will never act.

The talks have ground to a stagnant impasse on a point of procedure, not substance, after all.

So where does this leave the business community? It leaves us exactly where we were before over 190 executive jets landed in Denmark and 100’s of 10 miles a gallon stretch limos ferried the high and mighty to and from a ‘climate conference’! If we’re going to safeguard our ability to manage the effects of climate, if we’re going to come up with a strategy to maximise our use of diminishing carbon-based energy resources, we’re going to have to do it ourselves, unilaterally.

In that respect, it’s sadly business-as usual!

Following the TUC Congress earlier in the year, at which the Green Alliance report “Working on Change” was published by, Brendan Barber, TUC General Secretary, commented “This year’s Congress has called for a really profound shift in economic policy priorities to meet the challenges of a completely new economic era.”

Whereas the report might, cynically, be viewed as a means of raising a positive profile for the unions, the contributions made by various well known trade union leaders, and the substance of the content of the report, convincingly assure the reader that the trade unions, if not the organisations within which their members are employed, ‘get it’; they understand that the economy we work in today bears little resemblance to that in which most us will be employed in the near future, relatively speaking, and they are responding, pro-actively, to the challenge.

If all is really what it appears to be, then any government that follows the incumbent into power in 2010 had better beware; the self-serving militancy of the 1980s may well be replaced by a greener, and more appropriate, form of militancy which we shall doubtless see echoed at the Climate Change Conference this month as placard bearers from across the continent descend on Copenhagen to make the delegates accountable for their time.

What is simultaneously encouraging as well as disappointing is that the trade unions appear to clearly understand the threats and opportunities in a low carbon economy and are preparing for the challenge whilst many of the globe’s larger organisations and, more disappointing still, the vast majority of world governments are still mired in platitudes and power plays, all the while burning, at an alarming rate, fast-diminishing carbon resource and allowing low carbon energy providers to wither and die by the roadside  not because these companies are not providing economically viable energy solutions, but because both governments and corporations are unwilling, or incapable, of taking even a medium term view.

So, though it shocks me to say it, I may be fast coming to a point where I welcome the resurgence of trade union activism since, though it has taken a few decades for them to arrive at this point, they appear to have re-discovered their raison d’etre; to protect the long term futures of their members, something they will only do if they add their voice to growing cacophony of noise from scientists and a small number of well thought of economists who are all saying that the processes that got us to where we are today will not sustain us into the future.

The unions appear to have grown up and become educated; time for ‘the bosses’ to do the same?

For those of us not wholly consumed with the need to get the latest Wii for Christmas, this is rather missing the point, isn’t it? It has never been disputed that we did not start climate change; what has been established with scientific data is that we are accelerating the rate at which the planet is heading towards the next swing of the pendulum. What has been clearly established is that the mean temperature over areas of high industrial activity (mostly the developed western world) has risen disproportionately over the past 30-40 years.

The real issue with climate change is the way in which all nations work together as we go deeper into the 21st century, and this is what Copenhagen is really about. The developed nations have a raft of planned or actual measures to start the process of carbon emission reduction in preparation for a low carbon economy; what is not in place is a mechanism to allow the developing world to be as carbon conscious as we are starting to become. This requires co-operation and funding is part of what Copenhagen is all about.

Also, we are running out carbon fuels. Irrespective of what happens with climate change (though the effects are ignored at your peril), we need collectively to be supporting the implementation of clean tech as a mechanism for ensuring future economic stability and growth. The reality is that many of the parts of the world that we currently exploit for cheap labour (and so goods and services) will be precisely those that are best placed to generate clean energy.

It would be foolhardy not to consider these developing nations in any plans that come out of the next two weeks.

It would be even more foolhardy to try to subvert the effectiveness of the Conference with the red herring of disputed figures about climate change rates.

Climate is a non-human dependent reality and energy poverty is the issue that the business community should be more concerned about.

There will doubtless placard waving extremists from both sides of the argument closing in from around the world over the next two weeks, all eager to air their opinions about the state of the planet… leave them to it and start to work out ways (if you have not already done so) of how your organisation can be less carbon energy dependent.

Well, not only has nothing really happened since Miliband blurted out his bit of news at the beginning of the year, but the major energy providers (BP, EDF Energy, E.ON, Shell), together with a few others have clubbed together and thrown a bit of loose change at the Energy Technology Institute, a government-backed company, to commission a £3.5 million research project into finding out how much storage space there is in the UK for our carbon emissions.

ETI chief executive David Clarke is quoted as saying “Fossil fuels will remain an important source of energy and coal is a cheap and relatively secure fuel so we have to find a way of using those fossil fuel plants and capturing the CO2 and storing it somewhere. [..] CCS is a complex challenge and requires us to demonstrate a whole new aspect of UK energy operations in the next 10 years.”

So what appears to be being said here is that whilst the scientific data continues to mount, showing not only what is going to happen to carbon fuel prices over the next decade and the very real impact of continued carbon emissions at the current rate to the global ecology and, by implication, the global economy, the major energy providers, in cahoots HMG, are going to spend the next decade travelling the coastline of the UK (presumably, with £3.5 million in their pockets, first class all the way) looking out to sea with a pair of binoculars to scan for likely dumping sites.

In the meantime, they will continue to pump out carbon gases at an alarming rate before they actually (1) complete the study, (2) commission the construction of the storage sites, (3) commission the construction of the capture technology and infrastructure and (4) actually switch on the mechanism… at best, there will be something in place by 2030, at which point every meaningful target and deadline for carbon reduction will have been missed but the energy providers will still have been able to sell their oil, gas and coal at a premium and we’ll all be scrabbling around looking for alternative fuel sources that will power our businesses viably, economically and sustainably.

Now, I may be over-reacting a little but this all seems to me to be making a mockery of next month’s planned climate change summit in Copenhagen and begs the question as to whether the event actually has any relevance when the only green agenda the political arena entertains is the colour of big business’ money to the exclusion of its electorates future economic security.

The overall impression was that a group of people had been assembled who were empowered to say ‘no’ to everything and ‘yes’ to nothing; which leaves everyone wondering whether Copenhagen is worth the effort since it is now established that the best it can achieve is to set a framework for further discussion and assessment at a time when the discussion should really be over and actions should be being planned and executed.

The sticking point is, as it ever was, the different agendas of the first and third world nations, a difference that will never be resolved unless there is a major position shift by both parties based on evidence of need – and both parties, despite the wealth of hard scientific data, refuse to acknowledge the immediacy of this need when placed against their individual ‘wants’.

Whilst those we have elected to look after our interests continue to talk in an ever more confused and confusing fashion, desperately avoiding having to actually do something, others have grabbed the money-making opportunities that climate change has delivered and are forging ahead. Two companies illustrate that strategic action following innovative thought can yet turn a threat into an opportunity.

At an ‘investing in environmental funds’ seminar held in London last week, there was a presentation from Dasos Capital, who’s Global Forestry fund focuses on Europe and certain emerging markets who invest in the managed woodlands. Essentially, they generate returns in the form of net cash flows from sustainable forest management and selling timber, from pursuing complementary revenue from environmental services and from the sale of higher and better use (HBU) lands and, in addition, fully expect to realise additional long-term returns from timberland appreciation… in their words, “money really does grow on trees”.

At the same seminar, Steve Brosnan, commercial director of Cumulus Funds explained how climate change is basically temperature and how you can make money out of that. The company makes new- (green-) tech investments based on predicted weather pattern across the globe and is generating some very healthy returns based on the data it sources and utlises.

So, if evidence were needed that the world does not have to end with climate change and natural resource depletion, here are a few examples. Perhaps the luminaries who will be in Copenhagen next month should pay somewhat more attention to people who are doing ‘stuff’ and a little less to those who, at the best of times, are scared to make a decision and believe that we will re-design the economic and environmnetal landscape through endless talk.

As ever, we wait with baited breath!