The crucial role of business in saving the planet

An Article from Business Respect, Issue Number 98, dated 2 Jul 2006
By Mallen Baker

For decades, the science of sustainability has been obvious to anyone that cared to take an interest. The bit that requires courage and leadership - the politics and the economics of sustainability - has been a lot further behind. We know what we have to do, the question is how and what role does business have to play.

That science is pretty simple on one level. We should not use renewable resources faster than they can be renewed. We should not deplete non-renewable resources faster than alternatives can be found. We should not create wastes faster than they can be properly absorbed into the environment.

None of these elements are fixed. We can boost the output of renewable resources and we can reduce consumption. We can extend the lifetime on nonrenewable resources through more efficient technologies, and we can innovate with alternatives. We can reduce the creation of waste, and we can do things that may make them more easily absorbed and assimilated into the environment.

At the moment, we remain severely out of balance. A recent statement by the US Government said that it expected worldwide greenhouse gas emissions to increase by 75 percent by 2040. Even if that is wildly pessimistic, there is no light at the end of the tunnel on this one.

The question is how do we get there? Environmentalists have been saying for decades that we need to change our lifestyles to consume less. This has not proven to be a saleable message, and it's time we came to terms with why, and what we can do about it.

Let's be clear about this. No government of any democracy in any country of the world, nor international institution of authority, has gone to its constituency to argue for reduced consumption and reduced choice. Not once. Never. We can't even point to one brave government that took the stand and got voted out for its troubles. To reflect upon this fact decades after the Brundtland Commission first coined the phrase 'sustainable development' and to draw no call to action from it would be complacency in the extreme.

The first thing is to note what we still don't know. We don't know where the environmental thresholds are, and that may be a good or a bad thing. Ecosystems rarely gracefully decline. Rather as they are put under stress, they absorb the stress for a while, then show signs of distress, and then they can collapse rather suddenly. Will we experience a point where the global system, rather than growing a percent or two warmer will tip over into a different, more hostile state altogether? We don't know. All we know is that the current systems are showing signs of stress. We should not take it for granted catastrophe could not happen tomorrow.

Equally, nobody has proven that in order to achieve sustainability we will all have to wear hairshirts. Nobody has proven that the education and stimulation of foreign travel must be barred to all. Nobody has proven that fun and frivolity must be banned, with utility strictly rationed. There is still a gap between making do with less and suffering the least.

But what we do know, is that no-one will vote for hairshirts. Not the US, not the billions of people living on subsistence money who aspire to the Western lifestyle, not the football fans that have flown to Germany to indulge in fun and frivolity. No-one. And even if they did once, they would probably change their mind after four or five years of imperfect implementation and vote it out at the next opportunity. Hardly a basis for long term sustainability.

If sustainability is to mean something, it has to be a system that will deliver stability on an ongoing basis - not subject to political whims, not to be abandoned at the first sign of electoral unpopularity.

The only approach that will work is one that goes with the grain, depends on people being the way they are rather than the way we would like them to be. Solutions that somehow depend on people becoming less selfish or consumption-minded than they are, without being clear about how such a miraculous transformation is to be achieved, are just so much self-indulgence.

It is sometimes argued that there will have to be a benevolent green dictatorship to require us to all do what is good for us. The history of humankind gives no evidence that dictatorships are ever benevolent, and they have certainly never been sustainable. The resources required to keep the population subject requires very inefficient behaviour and ultimately, as Gandhi once observed, every dictatorship throughout history has eventually fallen. People will be free, regardless of the consequence.

Of course, some people say that we will after all do this things because we have no choice. We must adopt our hairshirts or perish. But there is always a choice, and if those were genuinely the only two choices the human race on past form will choose to perish. So we had better hope that there are more than two choices.

So what is the third choice? And where does business come in, exactly?

The third choice is to aim to give people the things they want, only to do it sustainably. After all, I don't want gigawatts. I don't want fossil fuels. I want heating and lighting, I want to be able to use the internet and listen to music and - well, all sorts of things.

We do know that affluent societies tend towards population stability. In many countries we are soon to face the downside of this - an ageing population. We also know that generally, once people achieve a certain level of material consumption, they don't go for more and more, they go for better. These two facts give a glimmer of how one can achieve an affluent, steady state society. Goods that meet peoples needs, but do so in a much more sustainable way.

We have already made progress in this area, not because politicians have shown a great deal of courage (things like the Kyoto Treaty may have helped, although it is notable that its biggest advocate - Europe - will fail woefully to meet its own Kyoto commitments) but because businesses have seen the writing on the wall and are beginning the journey. Global companies are setting themselves the target of carbon neutrality long before any nation has done the same.

With existing technology, we could make a car that is much more fuel efficient than the ones we have now. With more innovation, we may produce zero emission cars that are still stylish and thrilling to ride. We already have, with the internet, ways of transmitting information, music, video and a lot else besides in a much less resource intensive way. Does resource efficiency have to mean going backwards? No, it means having more for less.

So does that mean it's all in hand? We can sit back and wait for the engineers to solve the problem for us? Not in the slightest. The current ambition of effort by the broad global business community is a very long way from being sufficient. We need more from the leadership companies, and better support from an intelligent raising of the standards by government. We need well-targeted action by NGOs to draw attention to the worst abuses (as opposed to current strategies to discourage action by spending the most energy attacking the leaders for not being perfect already).

And it doesn't mean that there won't be some things freely available now that become scarcer later. If it proved impossible to radically improve the energy efficiency of air travel, for instance, it could well be that the cost of air travel - through whatever mechanism - would rise to reflect better its real cost, bringing to an end the era of cheap travel available to all, but still a widespread form of getting around. But we don't start of the premise of assuming that more efficient air travel is impossible.

The point is this. The most active proponents of sustainability tend to disdain business. Businesses are 'psychopaths' that are the cause of the problem and the problem will be solved by regulating them out of existence. Ironically, businesses are probably the best solution that we have to the challenges that face us as a society, because they are the ones that can innovate, can produce solutions, can be a part of the engine of development that will eventually bring developing countries out of poverty that may, just may, have a whisker of a chance of achieving sustainability.

Let's put it this way:
1. Government's taking courage and selling the message of less consumption to its citizens = no sign
2. The forces of benevolent dictatorship lining up to take power = never heard of them
3. Businesses innovating to produce more socially beneficial goods and services, made in more environmentally efficient ways = some first signs

But in order for that hope to be realised, more businesses need to follow the leadership currently being shown by the few. More leadership needs to be shown by governments as the price for getting to avoid going to the electorate on a platform of 'making do with less'. It remains our choice - for now.

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