Changing Agendas
I was frightfully late for work last week, through no fault of my own, I hasten to add. I woke up to the radio alarm, at 6.25 sharp as always, only to hear a report on the Today programme about a former Chairman of Shell stating that cars which manage less than 50 miles to the gallon are an unnecessary frivolity and should be banned under EU law.
Oil magnate? Large cars outlawed? Frivolity?
Naturally I thought I was still in a deep, deep sleep, put my head back on the pillow and blissfully snoozed on through my alarm call. However, I hadn’t been dreaming, it was a genuine news report, which could mark a watershed in the environmental movement.
Sure enough, environmentalists have been trying to persuade everybody for some time now that the green agenda is well and truly part of the mainstream, especially in big business. But everyone just smiled politely, felt it rude to argue, and carried on as before, flashing perhaps an apologetic smile as if the poor dear had finally lost it.
But here is a top dog, a fat cat, a retired Chairman no less, of one of the largest businesses on Earth, stating categorically that a huge number of his shareholders, and possibly his best-valued customers, are wrong to whiz about in cars that consume a litre of fuel reversing out of the garage.
And when faced with the normal hackneyed response: “that’s all well and good, but aren’t laws a bit of a draconian solution” - you know, the sort of counter argument put forward by people like, I don’t know, the Chairman of Shell Oil for example, for the past 25 years - Sir Mark simply points out that this is about morality, ethics and by virtue of which no-one can be exempt.
Priceless.
So, hooray! Today may have been a slap on the wrist for my timekeeping, but it was a massive slap round the face in realising that things are perhaps changing, and changing at the highest levels to boot.
Now, its not even close to the start of Spring, so I am confident no-one’s about to jump out and shout “April Fool!” but just in case, I will temper my enthusiasm just a smidgen, until a few more ‘suits’ come out in agreement with the (soon to be canonised if I have anything to do with it) Sir Mark Moody-Stuart.
But it does mean that things need to change swiftly to ensure the momentum is not lost. As with everything to do with business, it needs to be in the corporate mentality for change to occur. For too long, Chairmen and Chief Executives have hidden behind jargon like “shareholders” to excuse continuing as normal and not making changes that need to be made.
Surely the day that Bentley launches a mega-luxurious hydrogen car, with buckets of oomph and potable water as its only discharge, then things have really turned a corner?
The thing is, until the incentive is there to do things differently, business, driven by capitalist values, will resist change like the most pernicious limpet imaginable. Which is totally legitimate, that’s what they have to do, shareholders or something. At the moment, the over-hyped quest to find a petrol replacement in the form of biofuels is so missing the point as to be quite ridiculous. Scientists may as well have said, “Yes, we boffins have found a great replacement for petrol, and it only requires a small adjustment to your car’s engine. We call it diesel.”
Biofuels are a way of doing the same thing with the same technology, by simply swapping the fuel source. Not good enough, its like suggesting we all move over to woodfuel burners in our homes and then ship in palm wood from Indonesia to power the things. Great, more oil, but a lot less Orang-Utan filled rainforests. What we need is a different mobile power source in our personal transportation devices, it needs to produce no gaseous carbon emissions, and cause no loss of global resources.
Can it be done? I don’t know, at this point, but I wonder if someone in 1860 would have instantly dreamt up the Bugatti Veyron, after seeing Lenoir’s new invention in the morning newspaper? Some things have to evolve, they don’t just happen.