Search Results for: Tim elkington

Battle bus Clegg at work Symbolic of British public finances 2011?

Across to the Work Foundation this (Sunday) afternoon for a Lib-Dem ‘green growth rally’, led by Nick Clegg. Outside, the London Marathon, with scenes which made me think of the not-much-discussed-by-politicians looming crisis in public spending.  Met a number of the usual suspects, including Tom Burke, James Cameron (the Climate Change Capital variety), DK Matai, Rosie Boycott and Paul Ekins, and found Clegg’s comments encouraging – but not exciting. Later, I did a note that was published by DK’s ATCA, in response to a posting by Clegg.  Will copy it below, though the London 2012 idea didn’t make the final ATCA cut, perhaps because I sent it through later.

The ATCA posting:

I am reminded that when we founded SustainAbility way back in 1987, our tagline for many years was ‘The Green Growth Company’ — inspired by the notion that the environmental and wider sustainability agendas will create some of the defining market opportunities of the twenty-first century.  The latest report from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, ‘Vision 2050’, talks about markets worth USD 3-10 trillion by 2050.  

But, while I am impressed at the early momentum established by Nick Clegg and his team, welcome his pledge of GBP 3.1 bn and will once again vote Lib Dem next month, I feel very strongly that Britain has a fundamental problem when it comes to sustainability-related enterprise.  And it is a problem brought home to me once again when I co-led a study mission of 19 founders and CEOs of UK cleantech companies to California, particularly Silicon Valley, earlier in the year.

Stripped to its essentials, our basic, recurrent problem is that we are not good at bringing new solutions — cleantech or otherwise — to scale. We invent things like railways, exporting them to countries like Switzerland and Argentina (or at least did so when the world was our market oyster), but end up with the Germans increasingly running ours!  That’s the new Europe – and I welcome many aspects of it, as I do the fact that Nick Clegg is able to speak a number of languages. But how do we as a nation learn to speak the language of scale? How do we recover our ambition to drive new industrial revolutions?

I was meant to be in Korea last week, speaking at the Business for Environment (B4E) summit, but Vulcan willed otherwise. I was disappointed on various fronts, but particularly because I wanted to talk to some of those behind the country’s Green Economy strategy — which operates against a time horizon out to 2070. Korea sees itself as a future hub of the global Green Economy.  

Money isn’t the main problem here, welcome though that GPB 3.1bn would be.  Instead, as has often been argued, we need a more entrepreneurial, globally-oriented culture — so, in my dreams, I imagine the Eden Project’s Tim Smit as the UK’s Minister for Green Enterprise — within an evolving economic paradigm forcefully shaped by one of the greatest living Britons, James Lovelock. 

And this was my addendum:

My question to Nick Clegg and his colleagues is this: How can we ensure that we develop and sustain a vibrant, internationally significant Green Economy that doesn’t simply gift-wrap our inventions and innovations and hand them over to others (as happened recently with the sale of Cadbury to Kraft) who DO know how to scale?

Much of this comes down to global branding and sustaining national momentum over time. So here’s an idea that I think the next Government should take on. 2010 marks both the London Olympics and the 25th anniversary of the formal introduction of the linked concepts of sustainability and sustainable development by the Brundtland Commission. Under our noses, London has emerged as what I like to call the ‘World Capital of Sustainability’. This isn’t fanciful, it’s reality.

So the question here is how we can both celebrate this fact and build on it, positioning London and the wider UK as a sustainability hub for the world.

I think we should, I think we can, and I think it would be fun to do.

It would also signal the new Government’s serious intent in relation to the great social, environmental and governance challenges of our time, while discreetly noting that we are committed to being the go-to people.  And that’s where policies, not just money come in. If we fail to put in place the policy architecture that sustains this, we risk having the whole think implode, like Tony Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’.

To conclude: There’s a huge market–indeed civilizational–opportunity here to position London and the UK for the new century’s great challenges and opportunities. We should grab it with both hands. But we should do it with others, from the EU to Korea, and we should do it so well that others do our marketing for us.

 

Google’s Earth Day celebration

Earth Day 1970 was a critical launch platform for the global environmental movement – and features large in my PowerPoint slide showing the four great societal pressure waves since 1960, coinciding with the peak of the first wave. The focus at that time was on the USA, whereas when I joined the International Board for Earth Day 1990, the spotlight had gone global – thanks to the indefatigable efforts of Earth Day co-founder Denis Hayes. 

More on Earth Day 2010 here.

Now, 40 years on, it’s tempting to think what we can do to celebrate the 50th anniversary in 2020. Meanwhile, however, it’s good to see a constellation of NGOs coming together to protest Anglo American’s plans to develop the so-called Pebble Mine in Alaska’s Bristol Bay watershed. The NGOs have secured a full-page ad in today’s Financial Times, the same day that Anglo American holds it annual shareholder meeting in London.

Somebody hadn’t looked at the calendar!

 

 

A day working at home and, intermittently but determinedly, reading Ian McEwen‘s novel Solar, which I finished literally as the sun touched the western horizon, scratched by high-flying jets making good the huge global travel deficit of the past week. But the extraordinary silence in Barnes continues, with the air traffic taking off westwards, I assume.

Many, many years ago, perhaps in 1987, I did a multiple review of novels that addressed green issues, in Green Pages, most of which weren’t that great. But I found Solar really ‘sticky’, not least as the first novel that I know that has name-checked such iconic figures in our landscape as James Lovelock, Stewart Brand, Tim Flannery, Jared Diamond and Paul Ehrlich. The ending of Solar really got me – though the Stones are playing as I write this, rather than the Kinks.

Was interested to see the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado, featuring fairly prominently in the story. I visited them in 1981, when they were the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI) and Denis hayes was still a Director, for a few days more before Ronald Reagan began to dismantle Jimmy Carter’s solar efforts. (Interested to see on the NREL website today, the home page features – on a 3-image rotator – a photo of Denis speaking in 1970.)

My meeting was Denis was a key reason why nine years later Denis kindly invited me to join the International Board of Earth Day 1990, an initiative whose fortieth anniversary we celebrate today.

Jack Sim and Amy Animation Rafael next door Jack’s hat Some of today’s guests Jack holds forth Sublimely insulated from it all

A second day of hosting people stranded after the Skoll World Forum by the Icelandic eruption – this time with folk from Canada, China, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Very lively discussion, but even livelier after the arrival of Jack Sim of the WTO (World Toilet Organisation).

Later in the day, Charmian and I headed across to Knightsbridge for a session with JWT. Home relatively early, to watch a recording of the second programme in Joanna Lumley’s Nile series.  The best of British.

And now the planes are growling overhead once again as the airlines start to clear the backlog of people stranded around the world. As many have observed, this dark cloud has proved to have a brilliant silver lining – in that we got to see more of people we enormously admire, who would otherwise have winged their way home directly the Forum ended.

Christ Church College, with a condensation trail – an extinct species in a day or so Worcester College 1 Worcester College 2: zen space Sheldonian screen Tim Smit

Slightly s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d week, among other things heading down to Oxford by train on Tuesday evening for a Skoll Foundation dinner at Christ Church College, to celebrate the new round of awardees, ahead of the 2010 Skoll World Forum. Glorious glow as I was warmly greeted by many of the entrepreneurs. Next, joy of joys, found myself seated next to Sally Osberg and Jeff Skoll at the dinner, with Paul Hawken the other side of Sally, as a sequence of extraordinary social entrepreneurs took the stage to headline what they are doing around the world.

On Tuesday, there was also a magic moment as I waited at the seminar centre at Worcester College for a session to begin with the moderators for the Forum – and had about 20 minutes on my own. Very much, as the first person to arrive commented, a zen space and moment.

After various other meetings, including a partial Volans board meeting across the road from the Saïd Business School, I had to scoot back to London, to kick off an SAP conference on sustainability on Thursday. Various people slated to be on the platform weren’t there because of the Eyjafjallajokull eruption in Iceland, though technology swung into operation to link in one key speaker. Stayed all day, for an ongoing conversation with companies like BAT, Nestle and Unilever.

Then back to Oxford very early on Friday morning, in time for the first climate session – and then, at 11.00, for the one I was moderating on climate change, societal need and food security – with Mark Fulton, Mark Lynas, Ndidi Nwuneli (a member of the Volans Advisory Board) and Richard Jefferson as my panellists. Capacity audience and the feedback afterwards was extraordinarily positive. For an audio file, click here. Then lunch with Charmian and David Grayson, on an article we are working towards for Harvard Business School, and thence to the Sheldonian Theatre for the closing ceremony.

Highlight for me, at least, was Tim Smit of The Eden Project – and another member of the Volans Advisory Board. He was quite extraordinary, talking about things like “the Swagger of Intent”. You had to see it to know what he meant, but he would have made a great pirate. Another instruction that stuck in my mind was his injunction to, “Kill negative people – they don’t have dreams.” A little extreme, perhaps, but one knows what he means.

After a quick chat with him and a round of goodbyes, Debra Dunn walked me to the station – and I headed back east on the train, under a sky free of condensation trails, and to a home where the skies are quieter than they have been since the days after 9/11. This morning when I went out, the cars in the street were covered in a thin film volcanic ash. Found myself agreeing with an editorial in The Times this morning, about how the eruption underscores both our lack of control over our planetary destiny – and the abject failure of most political leaders to engage issues like climate change.