John Elkington

I confess I raised an eyebrow when I first heard that Jochen Zeitz, my co-author on the new book due out in September, was on the Board of Harley-Davidson – and is responsible for sustainability issues. But reading Time‘s account of the company’s evolving LiveWire battery-powered bike had me rethinking. It’ll be interesting to see how riders take to whining rather than throbbing, but has to be a step in the right direction

Take a peek at the history behind this flag by running the 3-minute video below

I sometimes struggle to explain to people who don’t follow Twitter why I find it so useful. But it’s a bit like living alongside an eAmazon , a great outpouring of information, on which all sorts of interesting things are borne along with the flow. At one level, it appeals to the beachcomber in me. So, for example, one of today’s treasures was this video mapping of European country borders over the past 1,000 years. All in 3 minutes. The music is tiresome, but you can always turn it down, or off.

I have always loved History, but this is ridiculous. And I confess it makes me feel more pro-European. It also gives a sense of just how fragile the Eu project may prove to be in the longer term.

I was pondering anniversaries this morning, my 65th on Earth on the 23rd, 40 years in the environmental and sustainability fields this year, 20 years of the triple bottom line this year, and it occurred to me to wonder when Gaia – or life on Earth – first managed to take a ‘selfie,’ as we now seem to call photographic self-portraits?

I had been thinking of the NASA Gemini or Apollo missions, whose images I recall being wonderfully inspired by.

So I dug around a  bit – and found that it had happened considerably sooner than I had thought, indeed before I was born, in 1946. Scientists used a V2 rocket fired from the White Sands Missile Range to take a series of far-from-full-Earth photographs, but exciting, nonetheless. The image shown came from a camera on V-2 #13, launched on October 24, 1946. (Photo: White Sands Missile Range/Applied Physics Laboratory)

If being able to see yourself as others see you is a key step in self-actualisation, this was in important moment for all of us. That said, we still have a long, long way to go. But then perhaps the multi-millionaires and billionaires who, one day, will be rocketed into space in vehicles operated by the likes to Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic will come back transformed, in the same way many astronauts would be.

I wrote my first report on climate change (among three other emerging environmental issues) for Herman Kahn of the Hudson Institute way back in 1978.

And the first blog in this series recorded a 2003 visit to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, where we learned just how systemic the crisis we are facing now is.

Even so, the way things are headed continuously takes my breath away. So, for example, two images I have come across in the past few days, while convalescing, brought home the sheer scale of what we are facing in the coming decades with climate change – and threw an uncomfortable light on where a growing proportion of the problem is now coming from.

The first image, above is from NASA, and shows that current carbon dioxide trends are, whatever the skeptics may choose to believe, unusual. The second came via Twitter, is equally shocking and shows that China used more cement in the three years from 2011-2013 than the United States did in the entire twentieth century.

This is not so much to point the finger as to underscore the extent to which China has clicked on and dragged across an obsolete industrial model from the West. If I try to put an optimist’s hat on, the best I can come up with is the notion that biomimicry might help inspire novel ways to produce cement and concrete – perhaps based on the way that the world’s coral reefs do it.

(Photo courtesy of FT)

How much of the world’s fossil fuel reserves will eventually be burnt? That is the critical question that Martin Wolf asks in his insightful article in today’s Financial Times. His view is that, on current assumptions, ExxonMobil probably has it right in arguing that the oil industry won’t suffer from stranded assets, because the world won’t act on climate change in time. But one of the most interesting voices in this space is the Carbon Tracker Initiative.

My own bet in the climate casino is that Carbon Tracker are right to argue that investors will be hit – and that means our pensions will be hit – in a shorter timescale than many imagine. As for ExxonMobil, they may be perfectly within their rights to argue as they do. But it is very likely that future generations will treat companies that did the heavy duty anti-climate-change lobbying in recent years in the same way that they have treated the tobacco industry. Anyone investing for the long term should therefore be wary of backing those who produce coal, oil and tracked gas.

A decade or so ago, I had a very energetic exchange on this subject with ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, over the heads of 300 or so oil industry executives gathered in Stavanger, Norway. He denied his company was lobbying to stall climate change initiatives. I think the record shows different – and the picture will look grimmer still when the deep historical analysis is done.