John Elkington

 

Back from Brazil this morning, finding it hard to forget the fate of AF447 – particularly when the flight out on Monday night hit quite an air pocket part-way out.  Was speaking at the Ethanol Summit 2009, in São Paulo.  Missed Bill Clinton’s speech, sadly, but enjoyed my panel with Lord (John) Browne (previously BP) and José Sergio Gabrielli de Azevado, President of Petrobras.  Recently wrote a letter to the Harvard Business Review in the wake of an HBR article by Gabrielli on the ‘greening’ of the giant Brazilian oil company.  There’s no doubt that progress has been made, but the company’s recent behaviour in its spat with Instituto Ethos, where I sit on the International Board, has been disturbing.

I took the photo above during a dinner hosted by UNICA, the Brazilian sugarcane industry association, at a wonderful restaurant called Figueira Rubaiyat, where the area in which we sat was built around this utterly astonishing fig tree, well over 100 years old, and the size of a pod of whales. I had bacalhau, salt cod, which was served in a sizzling cauldron and was utterly delicious.

Among the companies I spoke to during the event was Braskem, which is working on a range of ‘green’ polymers, including polyethylene.  Shown in the photos are a green version of Monopoly which they have been selling through Wal-Mart, where all the pieces are made of green polymers made from ethanol.

Finished off Philip Kerr’s stunning novel A Quiet Flame on the flight back, and ended up concluding that Argentina should have been given a free pass to miss the 20th century altogether. What an utter monster Perón was.

Leonora Novaes of Braskem with their green Monopoly game The board Pieces

Shadow shot

A slight double-take when an EDF promotional flyer came through the letterbox this morning, shown above right. Given that 17 books – including 1984’s Sun Traps: The Renewable Energy Revolution (Pelican Books) – and SustainAbility were all conceived and incubated in our smallish Barnes home, I have sometimes thought of putting a green plaque on the back wall of the house, to commemorate all the people who have been part of the extraordinary journey. Will certainly give EDF a call, but unsure whether we’ll get to the point of installing solar panels just yet. Builders have been a constant here over the decades – and Elaine is always nervous about giving them another foothold in our lives.

 

 

 

Astonishing fact reported in today’s Financial Times, that the gene that controls skeletal development in humans is identical to the one that helps corals create their exoskeletons.

 We mainly get The Times for the obituaries, but today it ran an article that resonated strongly, entitled ‘A peasants’ revolt in the new age of brutality’.  I have been warning for some years that the golden age of CSR is more or less over, which is the theme of this piece, but it sets the arguments in the context of the work of one of my favourite historians, Barbara Tuchman, and her book The Distant Mirror, which sits at my bedside.  Not comfortable reading.

Stepping into the future: Vestas windmill Raising the bar: Dr Pachauri My vehicle of choice for dealing with opposition to climate action Lise Kingo Final session: Blood, Rogers, Gowing, Tickell Blood and water: Shai Agassi waters David Blood Media@work Every which way: artwork at airport (detail) Airborne

After a pretty muddled start, with panels of CEOs allowed to meander on about corporate citizenship, the World Business Summit on Climate Change finally took off with a speech by Cate Blanchett and, the next morning, a panel moderated by the BBC’s Nik Gowing, who took the gloves off and really got to work on the agenda set at the beginning of the event by Al Gore and Rajendra Pachauri.  Video coverage can be found here.

Really enjoyed meeting Tim Flannery – and running a forestry session with him. Wonderful dinners with Novo Nordisk, including an intimate session with Al Gore, and at the Danish National Gallery, where I caught up with Nicky Gavron of the London Assembly, among others.

The final statement, dubbed The Copenhagen Call, was somewhat stronger than some of the sessions had led me to expect – one virtue of such things being drafted in parallel to such events.  It proposes six action steps.