Sustainability & Clean Energy Goes to Top of Business Agenda

There is a big surge in investment in alternative energy worldwide, this despite policy inertia in many places – not to mention the absence of an enforceable international treaty. The corporate world is acting swiftly, with most top companies moving the green agenda from the corporate brochure to the corporate plan, placing sustainable practices at the heart of what they do. This from Michael Roux, who is chairman of the Australian Davos Connection.

Michael Roux in The Age (23 April 2010):

CONFRONTED with a growing international consensus on climate change and the alarming possibility of a meaningful Copenhagen treaty, the forces for the carbon-fired status quo needed a strategy – and some luck.

In 2009, they got both.

The strategy devised and put into practice by sceptics and their industry and media sponsors is breathtakingly simple and devastatingly effective: drown climate change in a partisan political swamp.

Events, random and otherwise, have conspired to aid these forces no end. Consider just the past 12 months. The leak of thousands of emails between climate scientists – dubbed Climategate – seemed to reveal cracks in the scientific consensus as well as an unseemly political undertone in the research. The global financial crisis drew focus away from global warming and towards urgent domestic economic and political priorities. The UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen was caught up in a whirl of geopolitical point-scoring, ending in a nil-all draw. And, in Australia, the issue became proxy in a battle for the soul of the Liberal Party, kneecapping any hope for a bipartisan response.

This chain of events, the confluence of luck and strategy, has transformed climate change from an urgent global priority to just one more political grudge match.

The proponents for action on climate change naively rested on their scientific laurels, as if overwhelming evidence and the threat of impending catastrophe were enough. But, in modern political discourse, facts are far less important than framing.

If the science is basically irrefutable – and it is – the next-best approach is to discredit scientists themselves; to paint them as elitist conspirators on a mission to sacrifice growth and jobs on the altar of environmental extremism.

The global climate change debate has no momentum, except perhaps in reverse.

For example, a meeting was held in Bonn last week to rescue some working parts from the wreckage at Copenhagen. It opened to low expectations and had trouble meeting them.

Yet the picture on climate change brightens at the national level. Recent research into the global clean-energy economy by Pew Charitable Trusts has uncovered a big surge in investment in alternative energy worldwide. This has happened despite policy inertia in many places – not to mention the absence of an enforceable international treaty.

In the five years from 2005, clean-energy investments have increased by 230 per cent globally. China, now the world leader in clean energy, increased such investments by 50 per cent in 2009 alone. Britain, Spain and Brazil are other standout performers, investing heavily in wind and solar. In quiet ways, even the US has made strides with big-ticket renewable energy and transportation initiatives – and the green credentials of states like California are second to none.

Australia lags at 14th among the G20 for investment in clean energy.

Meanwhile, the corporate world is acting swiftly on sustainability, oblivious to diplomatic wrangling or public ambivalence. Over the past two years most top companies have moved the green agenda from the corporate brochure to the corporate plan, placing sustainable practices at the heart of what they do. What the World Business Council on Sustainable Development calls ”The Race for Green” is under way in earnest.

Australian business competes well: Westpac, IAG and Stockland are among nine Australian companies rated in the top 100 sustainable companies at the World Economic Forum this year. No country performed better.

Election-year politics in the US and Australia make heavy lifting of the issue but, away from the political spotlight there is plenty of urgency in both countries.

In contrast, the British general election is a contest between three parties eager to claim the climate change mantle and offers no room for sceptics.

Even as many of our companies do the opposite, Australia’s politicians have surrendered any claim to moral or policy leadership on the defining issue of our lifetime.

Michael Roux is chairman of the Australian Davos Connection.

Source: www.businessday.com.au