Search Results for: Tim elkington

Flew to Zürich late yesterday, to speak at a conference organised by öbu. Bit of a hiccup at the airport, where a busload of passengers from the same BA flight were taken to an entrance where they didn’t have to show their passports – at which point, the terminal was locked down while the BA passengers were separated out. Not fun.

But I had been through passport control, so eventually managed to blag my way out, and into a welcoming mobility car driven by Remo Rusca of Smart Identity.

Very much enjoyed the event today, which was linked to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, whose side session I joined in the afternoon. Nice interval sitting outside in the square with Joanna Hafenmayer of MyImpact, also a board member of öbu.

Had fretted that the threatened strike by French air traffic controllers would keep me in Zürich, but BA 717 took off on time and, despite a couple of turbulence-related lurches as we headed into Heathrow, I got home in good time and good order.

Former PM John Major was in the front seat of 717 as I boarded – and no doubt (this is a postscript) was pondering what he would say about the Brexit/Leave campaign. His thoughts widely broadcast today.

Went across to Amsterdam on Wednesday, to take part in the fifth GRI Global Conference. Spoke at a panel session on Wednesday afternoon, featuring the new GRI Technology Consortium, which I now chair.

That evening, we had a dinner of Consortium members on the top floor of a glorious restaurant, Restaurant Incanto, with lashing rain and a wonderful lightning storm raging all around. GRI Chief Executive Michael Meehan and I both both did brief  welcomes. Sat next to – and had a great conversation with – Ernesto Ciorra, Head of Innovation & Sustainability at Enel Group, the Italy-based international energy company.

On Thursday, I serendipitously had a glorious lunch with GRI co-founders Bob Massie and  Allen White (now of the Great Transition Initiative), thanks to Felipe Arango of BSD Consulting. Extraordinary to think back to the early days of GRI, when Bon was still at CERES and, as Bob reminded me, I persuaded the founding group to go triple bottom line, rather than just environmental.

Then keynoted the third primary session, before many of us took off on a low-slung, glass-tipped boat through the canals, to the West-Indisch Huis, the original headquarters of the Dutch West India Company, a poorer relation of the Dutch East India Company. But the building is lovely, arranged around a courtyard, where a harpist played. Various comments about colonialism, but a joyous evening nonetheless.

On the boat I had a mind-spinning conversation with Liv Watson, once a skateboarding champion, among other things, and now at Workiva. She has been a longstanding champion of the XBRL reporting language – and is now immersed in Blockchain. At dinner, I sat next to Roberto de Ocampo, a former Finance Minister in the Philippines. Great conversation.

Came back early today. Intensified security in Schiphol after the news that another EgyptAir flight has gone down, this time in the Mediterranean, again likely to be terrorism.

Alex Steffen was high on our list of people to meet on our recent San Francisco trip, but missed him this time round. I regret it even more after reading a blog he sent out yesterday on what he calls predatory delay. For more on what he is doing at The Heroic Futures, see here.

Meanwhile, as I limber up for an Oslo trip on Monday, where I will be speaking at three events, I’m finding the predatory delay concept helps crystallise a number of concerns I have had for some years about the whole sustainability industry.

Alex notes that: “Some people seem to have a hard time even understanding the concept of the rights of future generations. The idea that people who do not yet exist have the right to assert their needs in our lives is one that seems to be hard to fully grasp.

“Think of this example: If someone sets a bomb to go off in a public square a year from now, is he committing a crime? Should he be stopped? Almost everyone would say yes. Should he be tried before a court of law and prevented from doing further harm? Most of us would agree that he should. What about ten years? What about 100? When does our obligation to avoid serious, predictable harm to others end?

“Now, here’s the tricky part: climate emissions (and huge array of other unsustainable practices) are the bomb, and your grandkids and great-grandkids are the victims.”

He goes on to say:

“As long as we don’t use more of the planet’s bounty than can be sustainably provided in perpetuity, we have the ethical right to enjoy the best lives we can create. But the minute we stray into unsustainable levels of consumption, we’re not in fact spending our own riches, but those of future people, by setting in motion disasters that will greatly diminish their possibilities. Unfortunately, nearly everyone living a middle class or wealthier lifestyle now enriches their lives at the cost of future generations. As Paul Hawken says, ‘We have an economy where we steal the future, sell it in the present, and call it G.D.P.’

“Now, obviously, most of us did not intend to find ourselves in this situation, and so for a couple decades we had a legitimate argument that we needed a reasonable amount of time to change our ecological impact. It’s become clear that many of our leaders’ definition of a reasonable amount of time, though, is for things to change sometime after they’re dead.

“This is what I mean when I say that we have a politics of ‘predatory delay.’ Many wealthy people understand that their profits are extracted through destructively unsustainable practices, and they’ve known it for decades. By and large, they no longer deny the need for change, they simply argue for delay, on the basis that to change too quickly would be unfair to them.

“This allows them to been seen as responsible and caring. They want change, they claim; they just think we need prudent, appropriately paced change, mindful of economic trade-offs and judiciously studied — by which they mean cosmetic change for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, they fight like hell to delay change of any real magnitude, attacking not only the prospects of our kids and kin in the future, but increasingly of our society in the present. Their delay has real, serious human consequences, across generations. They’re taking, not creating; the harm they cause is measurable.”

For more of Alex’s thinking, sign up for his newsletter.

It’s around 11 years since an X Prize Foundation team came to see me at SustainAbility’s London offices in Bedford Row. That was around the Ansari X Prize time. Have been fascinated by their approach and activities ever since – and Peter Diamandis’s books Abundance and Bold are virtually set texts at Volans.

Serendipitously, we came across Paul Bunje (who is pivotal on the energy and environmental sides of their work) no less than three times in the recent past, and he kindly offered the keys not only to the Foundation, but also to Singularity U and organisations like IndieBio (both covered in earlier posts).

He also engineered it that we could sit in on a filmed seminar Peter Diamandis – who I talked to, of all places, in the restroom this morning – was doing for Success Magazine. Then we had mind-boggling conversations with the new CEO, Marcus Shingles, with Joel Carnes (who runs the Prizes) and with Paul.

It will take a while to process what we learned, and continue to learn, but with only one more visit to do – to the LA Cleantech Incubator, introduced to us by Paul – I have to say that this trip has exceeded my expectations by the proverbial country mile.

Recommended by Paul Bunje of the X Prize Foundation, I had only read of Planet Labs – but after visiting, am stunned I didn’t know more. Their motto: ‘Using Space to Help Life on Earth.’ We met one of the founders, Robbie Schlinger – and I came away totally sold on what they are doing.

Reminded me of the project I did for WRI on space and information technologies ways back in the 1980s, which resulted in a report called The Shrinking Planet.

Robbie had spent 9 years at NASA, where he helped build the Small Spacecraft Office at NASA Ames and was Capture Manager for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). He later served as NASA’s Open Government Representative to the White House and as Chief of Staff for the Office of the Chief Technologist at NASA.

Love the spirit of their approach: “We care deeply about creating positive change and commercial value. At Planet, ethics are at the foundation of everything we do. We have fun, love space and are committed to transparency for the planet, for our company, and for our customers and partners. Our philosophy is to move fast: design, build, learn, repeat.”

Their Dove satellites fly in the face of conventional space industry wisdom. “They’re not works of arts, Ferraris,” is the way Robbie explained it. Instead, they’re tiny, are sent up in considerable numbers, or “flocks,” and can be programmed to operate like compound eyes in space.

Then on to RBS, or the Royal Bank of Scotland, to see their man in the Valley, John Stewart. They’re scouting, too, but they’ve put down strong roots. Their aim: :”To help customers solve problems they don’t yet even know they have.” 99.9% of Californians in the business are “nuts,” he suggested, but the result can be astonishing breakthroughs. One of his interests: quantum computing.

His aim is to make all of this relevant to someone on a dark, rainy morning in Bradford, without a cup of coffee in their hand or a small dog at their heel.

Then the Breakthrough scouting team split up for the first time, with Ingvild (Sörensen) and Sam (Lakha) making off to Facebook, while I went to see Emma Stewart at Autodesk, where she is Head of Sustainability Solutions. She is also involved in a new initiative designed to operationalise the triple bottom line, Impact Infrastructure.

The background: Impact Infrastructure, Inc. was founded in March 2012 and has offices in Manhattan and in Toronto’s Annex at the Centre for Social Innovation. The company’s primary goal is to create a standardized suite of business case analysis tools to promote the development of more sustainable and resilient communities. They talk in terms of “Sustainable Return on Investment” analysis (or SROI).

Then across to the Caltrain station to catch a train to Menlo Park, for a serendipitous dinner at a Turkish restaurant with the reconvened scouts, and Janine Benyus, Beth Rattner and Courtney Morehouse of Biomimicry 3.8 and Biomimicry Institute (where I’m on the Board, as is Stefan Heck, mentioned in an earlier post in this series). They had just been to see Google X, or X as I think they now call themselves.

We were also joined by Richard Northcote and his colleague Alice from Covestro, who are working on the next leg of the Solar Impulse‘s flight – this time from Hawaii to San Francisco. We are working with Richard and Covestro on the con kept of carbon productivity. The evening fairly flew, particularly when I switched us to the Turkish wine.

Wonderful people – and a sense of being part of a true paradigm shift.