Search Results for: Tim elkington

I spent Climate Week in New York, with key events including: the UN Global Compact Leaders Summit on 20 September; a UNGC Breakthrough Innovation parallel event which I co-hosted the day before; our Carbon Productivity Roundtable (again on the 20th), followed by a dinner, downstairs at the wonderful Il Gattopardo; and then various meetings around town with the Covestro team – Patrick Thomas (CEO), Markus Steilemann (CEO designate) and Richard Northcote (Chief Sustainability Officer). All aided and abetted by Lorraine Smith, our wonderful anchor in NYC.

Patrick was speaking as part of a Breakthrough Innovation panel during the UNGC Leaders Summit, for which I had also briefed Alan Middleton (CEO of PA Consulting) who chaired the session. (So I had a vested interest in the thing succeeding, which it definitely did.)

Before that session, a real highlight for me – and I think everybody – was a seemingly extempore speech by Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto. The man who challenged Donald Trump’s assertion that in spurning the Paris Climate Accord he was representing Pittsburgh, not Paris.

Fascinated to visit the Purpose Climate Lab one evening with Richard, steered in by a key contact from IKEA. Met many people I know – and a fair few I didn’t.

On the last day, Friday, Lorraine, the Covestro team and I had a great lunch at Da Noi with Lise Kingo and Lila Karbassi of UNGC. After which I headed across to the Pershing Square Café, for separate sessions with Jed Emerson (who has recently built a 3,000 volume library on capitalism) and Mira Merme (who is developing a vertical farming project in Amsterdam).

Grisly flight back, with Virgin using Delta as a carrier, and Delta shoving me into the worst of Economy seats, despite the fact that I was booked in Business. No apologies. And no intention of flying with either airline in the future, if I can avoid it.

As I flew I was reading Omar el Akkad’s brilliant dystopian novel American War, which didn’t exactly boost my sense of optimism about the deep future – despite having enormously enjoyed the NYC trip overall.

Geoff Lye and I have worked together since the early 1990s, both at SustainAbility and at Volans. Extraordinary to see the coverage this week of his travails with British Airways en route to Greece – and to see how much more coverage the media is prepared to give to disasters than to the underlying processes that build up to cause them. His story has been featured in, among others, The Evening Standard, The Sun, The Telegraph and The Times.

For years – in fact since my coining of the Triple Bottom Line in 1994 – I have often said that I am happiest when things come in threes.

In large part that’s because I can remember three things, whereas four or five sometimes stretch the memory.

People have long played with the trio idea, notably including The Body Shop in Australia – which at one point used an image showing the rear ends of three cows.

But I really wasn’t thinking of a trio of hurricanes seeking landfall. According to the US National Hurricane Centre this is unparalleled. “Is this the new normal?” they wonder.

Flew to Amsterdam on 1 September with Elaine, and took our neighbour Faye Hahlo out to supper at De Bolhoed. After a beer at an open air bar by the canal. She is just starting her second year at the University of Amsterdam.

Over the following days, we visited a slew of museums, including NEMO, where we went up to the roof bar one evening to watch the sun set; the Hash, Marijuana & Hemp Museum (where I spotted a model of a hemp-canvas-covered Conestoga wagon, of the type that part of our family took the “Great American Desert” in the middle of the 19th century); the Tulip Museum; and The Hermitage, where we bought a crystal ball, to help me connect tomorrow’s dots.

But probably the highlight was the National Maritime Museum, with its replica of the East Indiaman Amsterdam and a stunning exhibition of navigational instruments and technology.

Spent a wonderful afternoon and evening with Thomas Rau, Sabine Oberhuber and their family, which began with my swarming up into their children’s tree house. And included dinner within the extraordinary fortifications of Naarden.

Then the work side switched in, with a keynote to the Fourth Annual Green Bond Roundtable, hosted by Rabobank. As I was preparing for this, I remembered going with Gaia to Amsterdam back in 1998 to speak at Rabobank’s centennial conference. The roundtable worked out very well, with extremely positive feedback afterwards.

Then, on Tuesday, Richard (Roberts) and I took the train across to Eindhoven to see Harry Verhaar of Philips Lighting. Thomas and Sabine had played a significant role in the company’s evolution of their ‘lighting as a service‘ business model.

Sardine-like packing of train for part of trip back, but then we got a seat. And there were moments, as when the customs people insisted in  unpacking and investigating the crystal ball, when I wished we had left it back at The Hermitage, but maybe it will crystallise a new era in our thinking about the future?

Orri Vigfússon said that he was “a new kind of environmentalist. I don’t take the moral high road.” Instead, as his obituary in The Times on 29 July noted, he described himself as a “green capitalist”.

When I wrote The Green Capitalists, published 30 years ago in 1987, I had to cast around for people who truly fitted the label. Vigfússon, who I sadly never met, did – and in a number of dimensions. A key element of his work was to buy up fishing rights from trawler owners and others whose activities were leading to the possible extinction of the Atlantic salmon, the “King of Fish.”

Useful background on his career can be found here – while reactions to the news of his death can be found here.