The Business of Climate Change

“The environment and the economy are really both two sides of the same coin. You cannot sustain the economy if you don’t take care of the environment because we know that the resources that we use whether it is oil, energy, land … all of these are the basis in which development happens.  And development is what we say generates a good economy and puts money in our pockets. If we cannot sustain the environment, we cannot sustain ourselves.” {Wangari Maathai, Kenyan Environmentalist}


Following on from yesterday's comment that the private sector was in large measure responsible for global warming...

For the first time in its history Wall Street, the engine of the market economy, shut down on two consecutive trading days courtesy of 'super storm' Sandy.

In the wake of Sandy, a group of British Fund Managers indicated to the British Chancellor of the Exchequer that it was time the Government took climate change seriously. 

So, is the private sector, the engine of economic growth, suddenly seeing the light?

Perhaps.

Jon Snow Channel4 TV news anchor describes in a blog his impressions following an invitation from a "big company to chair..a gathering to look at what they should be doing above and beyond their own core line of business."

The following are extracts from the blog that stood out for me:

"There was surprising consensus that we are living amid unprecedented global warming ... perhaps four per cent by the end of the century; perhaps six per cent soon after that.
  
In short, the evening became a debate about sustainability and the inability of the political classes to tackle it.

There was widespread recognition that this fight for survival could not rest on the state.

...there was agreement round the table that the corporate sector had to learn that the very ingredients they had contributed to this crisis must now be turned around and deployed to resolve it." 


Even if this sudden awareness and sense of urgency is based on enlightened self-interest, that works for me.


Jon Snow's blog: Last Chance Saloon to Save the Planet (28 November 2012) can be found at http://blogs.channel4.com/snowblog/                                     






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