In the Shift

Previously I’ve talked about Climategate as akin to what happened to Monsanto in the backlash agains genetically modified foods, or to the dubious science used to link MMR vaccines to autism.

But my favourite interpretation that Climategate is a Tiger Woods moment.

Tiger Woods is a great golfer: the best of his generation. But Tiger Woods became much more than a golfer: he became a brand, one of the biggest brands in world sport. Woods came to define the intrepid quest of the senior manager (Accenture), character (TAGHeuer), performance (Gatorade), and victory (Nike). I doubt if Woods had much involvement in building that brand other than cashing the cheques; but when his personal life hit the headlines in 2009, he was judged by the values in the brand that had been constructed around him – a brand that came crashing down, taking him with it.

Climate change also became a brand, one that was built around a strong scientific consensus. Emboldened (as only outsiders can be) by their new found status as visionaries, climate change scientists plunged into public policy, ethics, culture, and economics. Many politicians, journalists, civil society groups, and business leaders listened, and in their own ways created the brand. Brand Climate Change grew, and became as values-driven as it was evidence-based.

Scientists did not build this brand, although some were happy to contribute, often by talking on issues about which they were as naïve as they were assertive. But the brand was irrevocably connected to the science just as Brand Tiger was welded to golf. In a Tiger moment, it is not Climategate’s assault on the science that matters as much as the accompanying serious blows delivered to policy, public opinion, private sector attitude, and all of the other elements of ‘non-science’ that ultimately combine to legitimize any scientific belief, and without which scientific beliefs cannot be harnessed to influence human behaviour.

The other week I went to a seminar by Jerry Ravetz where there was an unnerving degree of consensus that the International Panel on Climate Change and the UEA’s work on climate change had been ‘discredited’, and that the belief in anthropogenic climate change was ‘unravelling’ because ’so much of the science was unsound.’

The paper has been posted elsewhere so I won’t go into it here. But its insights were built on the premise that there was a huge scientific conspiracy that had excluded anyone who didn’t buy into the narrative of climate change. This is the angle on climate change that some opponents to the very idea of man-made change have been taking for years. A couple of years ago it seemed to be on the wane, and certainly in my own education programmes for business it was becoming less and less necessary to justify the climate change science.

Phew, what a relief!  Or so I thought.

Sometime last year, just when it seemed Christopher Monckton and Melanie Phillips were the last holdouts of climate change denial, the world lurched once again. In the space of a few years climate change scientists have gone from radical outsiders to elitist insiders, and the climate change denial movement is bizarrely able to present itself as a bastion of rebellion and free thinking. I say bizarre not only because historically the money for climate change denial science has come from dubious sources, but because there really isn’t a cohesive denial ‘movement’.

There are a lot of people with gripes and disagreements about different aspects of the science, government policy, the economics and so on.  But they don’t share a lot in common – not even schadenfraude.  Take a look at the Spectator special on climate change in December 2009: the experts they had lined up are as disparate a bunch as you could imagine  They can’t even agree on the absence of climate change. The only certainty in all the pieces came from the Spectator editorial itself and a banker. Now it’s happening again with Matt Ridley’s front cover story in the 6 February issue .

Now, there are some legitimate questions, and the scientists haven’t showered themselves in glory in their response which in a previous blog I characterised as their ‘Monsanto moment.’ On reflection, it might better be thought of as a MMR moment when – reflecting the public’s fear about the health impacts of a vaccine based on what turned out to be discredited research – public response and scientific evidence parted company.

Except this is more than legitimate doubt in a particular vaccine generated by seemingly credible research.

The ‘global warming meltdown’ (as the Spectator labels it) is the equivalent of the MMR study leading to a total breakdown in trust in Western medicine.

Now, I happen to believe this is a disaster because climate change and the challenges of sustainability are real, and ignoring this is not a good thing for humanity. But even if I didn’t believe that, I’d say there is enough evidence out there to warrant sensible responses.

Instead, what I see are parts of the media (and academia and other parts of society that help shape opinion) getting far too immersed in their own mythologies. There was a moment when climate change science appeared to have shaken these myths at least enough to make reasoned debate something desirable. Now, the great mythical narratives have returned.

So why my heading to this piece? Remember Peter Rankilor? In March 2009 he was jailed for multiple sexual offences against childfren.

• The Times described him as a civil engineering expert (21/3/09).
• The New Civil Engineer showed a bit more sophisticated understanding about his professional expertise, and called him a world-renowned authority on the design and application of geotextiles,geomembranes and geosynthetics.
• The Daily Telegraph called him ‘a respected climate change scientist’. (23/3/09)

Peter Rankilor sounds an unpleasant person. But the Telegraph wasn’t talking about Rankilor, was it? It was constructing a story that fit its own grand mythical narrative that those who study climate change (unless they doubt the reality of it) are to be feared and abused.

There is nothing in the article to suggest Rankilor was a climate change scientist in any way, manner, shape or form. In fact, the text says his world-renown was as a leading expert in geosynthetics which has a fair bit to do with civil engineering but not a lot to do with climate change.  But nonetheless the Telegraph saw fit to mention Rankilor’s climate change expertise twice in its headline, even if later on the only substantiation was that he lectured in Institute of Civil Engineering courses that had climate change as a component (maybe because if flooding increases or rivers alter civil engineers might want a bit of advanced warning).

Not content with linking climate change and padeophilia, the Telegraph also added the description ‘multi-millionaire’ to Rankilor’s claims to infamy. Given that the Telegraph is owned by the billionaire Barclay brothers, multi-millionaire could be an attempt to salvage Rankilor’s reputation (“a wrong’un on kids and climate but came up to muster on the earnings front”). Or maybe it was an insult – ‘god, if the man hadn’t messed around with children and dodgy science he could have earned some real money.’

I don’t know, you’ll have to ask the Telegraph’s sub-editor about that one. But the latest twist in the climate change debate promises much more insinuation, name-calling and bile, all of which will be amunition for someone to avoid the transformation that is required.

PS Monsanto moment?  MMR moment? No, this is our Tiger Woods moment.  But more of that next time.

When you search on the name of your company and the first images that come up are ones with skulls, gas masks, protests, and aggressive cartoons, you know you have a communication problem.

Welcome to the world of Monsanto: huge, successful, innovative, despised and distrusted.

I’m not going to delve into whether Monsanto’s image is justified or not.  And I’m certainly not going to go down the blackhole that is the genetically modified organism debate, important though it is.

No, all I really want to flag up is that at some stage in the 1980s, after once having been on the side of the ‘food for everyone and better deal for farmers’ angels, Monsanto became corporate monster Number One, and ever since has battled it out for the top spot with Nestle, Coke and the Hummer.  And it won this position because it was so convinced it was right that it stopped trying to explain; it stopped listening to doubts; and it treated as idiots those who said it was wrong.

The Monsanto story came to mind the other week listening to an esteemed group of economists, scientists and policy advisors trying to make sense of the fight against climate change following the non-result of the Copenhagen Summit. There is a tangible sense of exasperation which is starting to smack of when agribusiness and plant scientists began getting frustrated that Jo Public couldn’t understand the benefits of GMs.  There is exasperation too with politicians listening too little to economic reasoning, scientific evidence, and the proposals of technology innovators.  One expert said it was time to hand over climate change policy from the International Panel on Climate Change to the World Trade Organisation.  An economist hinted that laws that contradicted economic rationality bordered on the illegitimate.

These may or may not be sensible ideas looked at from the confines of isolated disciplines.  But they are unworkable.  They show no cognisance of the challenge of communicating and winning support for tackling climate change.  Like Monsanto, they echo of experts saying ‘We are right. Trust us and don’t ask dumb questions.’

After the Copenhagen Summit, Ed Miliband, the British government’s climate change secretary of state for energy and climate change, said that climate change was now a communications challenge.  Perhaps more accurately he should have used the words of his government’s Central Office of Information which had said a few weeks earlier that

climate change was a behavioural change issue. Communications

smacks of PR,

marketing and the descent of the Mad Men.
Behavioural change, for all its Orwellian overtones, is something altogether more serious and challenging.

I am more and more convinced that behaviour change is central to tackling climate change:

an element perhaps more essential than economic interventions, new technologies, and government regulation.  At least we have a fair idea of what is economically, technologically, and regulatorily possible. But as soon as we think beyond the boxes of economic incentives, technology uptake, and regulatory restrictions, we don’t seem to know much of anything about behaviour change .  And as Monsanto can tell you, behaviour change often defies those neat but simplistic change models.

A while ago I likened tackling climate change to the 1st World War.  But an earlier struggle also offers important lessons.

I’m talking about the abolition of strategy in the British Empire.

Postcard celebrating emancipation

Why?

Because it is one of those rare moments in history when ethical arguments eventually trumped economic ones.  At least that’s the argument Seymour Drescher makes in his 2009 book, Abolition.  He says that when Wilberforce and others created the antislavery movement in Britain, slavery was still a thriving economic system.  Neither slave uprisings in Haiti and French Saint-Dominique, nor the need for more skilled labour to work in inceasingly mechanised industries, nor even the shift from mercantile to laissez-faire capitalism made slavery redundant.  In other words, slavery didn’t end for economic reasons: on the contrary, support for slavery crumbled despite its economic justifications.

Now, this is controversial.  Drescher’s latest book and his earlier out of print Econocide are direct refutations of Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery which says that for all the noble efforts of abolitionists, slavery in the Empire ended because of the economic decline of the colonies that had depended upon it.  I’ll leave it to you to decide whether Drescher or Williams gets it right about slavery’s demise – and if you’re interested, David Brion Davis compares their differing points of view in a recent New York Review.

But if Drescher is right it is one of the most compelling examples that humanity can transform incumbent systems even when they are economically viable.

So, the unthinkable happened and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (USA) has a Republican senator. Why is this so monumentous for the rest of the world? Poke a stick into the virtual world and you will find innumerable analyses of what happened – my source of info on Massachusetts (my one time home) is WBUR.

But from the climate change perspective is that one more Republican senator could be the final stab wound in America’s already stumbling attempts to take meaningful action. Up until this week, the Democrats had a 60 seat supermajority in the Senate which meant that the filibuster – that peculiar weapon that allows minority parties to delay legislation as famously depicted in James Stewart’s Mr Deeds Goes to Washington – could not be used. Now they don’t, and bills on matters from health care reform to greenhouse gases run the risk of being diluted or ditched entirely.

Insofar as the Massachusetts election is a victory for the Republican grassroots movement known as the Tea Party, it is a vote against the kind of social and economic reform that needs to happen in the USA if the mother of emitters is to be part of a low carbon world. The Tea Party goers are small government, private sector, market-solutions supporting people of the kind that used to be synonymous with C19 Liberals. In the Bush era the Republican leadership could energise the grassroots by using abortion, the war on terror and the right to life as rallying cries in the so-called heartland.

Now climate change could play a bit part in a similar strategy. (The starring role will of course be taken by the economy and health care reform.) The victor in the Massachusetts senate race appealed to many voters because he campaigned from a gas guzzling pick-up truck. Climate change action is unpopular: it poses too many threats to iconic aspects of modern American culture. When push comes to shove, quality of consumption trumps quality of life for many many Americans. The health care reform debate is often about the right to procedures that only one in a million people will needs, and ignores the fact that Americans pay over the odds for a lousy health care system that delivers low life expectancy. Yet many Americans seem prepared to fight for the shiniest system with the poorest outcomes.

And that’s how it is with climate change too.

Americans have spent too much time and effort doing soul-destroying jobs that require them to work all hours with little security all in order to grab the golden ring. The changes needed to tackle climate change all seem to deprive people of the chance of the ring. At least that’s how it appears once the geniuses of branding, marketing and PR have shoved it through their mangles.

In a chastened Senate, the message that climate change transformation borders on the unAmerican will be easier to sell. Obama talks proudly of American leadership. Now’s the time to lead at home.

It’s the festive season and rather than pretend there’s time between parties and pantos to write anything remotely insightful, I thought I’d scribble a few of my favourite blogs and posts this year.  In no particular order, they are:

Dan Bodansky’s letter from the Barcelona Climate Change Talks that preceded COP-15.  This and blogs such as BBC journalist Richard Black’s blog from Copenhagen (I especially liked Day 4) show the complexity of the negotiations and why they are such under-achievers.

Duncan Green of Oxfam’s From Power to Poverty blog is always interesting on sustainability issues in developing countries (even if there’s a bit too much linking to George Monbiot for my liking).

C-Questor I like because it is a well maintained up-to-date source on developments in the climate change arena.  No whistles and bells, but reliable.

Richard Pielke uses his blog to set out his ideas. He has got caught up in the climate change fact or fiction debate recently.  What he says is that we need to do some serious thinking about what we invest in tackling climate change.  What he doesn’t say is the science is in dispute.

The BusinessGreen blog is one of a not very large number of blogs that have a particular focus on business and sustainability. It is targeted at the private sector, and promises useful advice on tackling climate change.  A bit more academic but hoping to reach a similar audience is David Levy’s Climate Inc. which has some interesting posts on sustainable finance, carbon accounting, and carbon markets.

And a couple of my own favourites from past weeks:

Bring Me Your Good Causes in September looked at the contradictory policies government is pursuing, and how they could undermine sustainability efforts. Pensions – Viagra or Poison Pill looked at the train wreck that might happen if we try to pursue decarbonisation at the same time as demanding better performing investments to pay for our old age.

Happy reading and Happy holidays.

When Copenhagen winds up in a week’s time it seems pretty certain the limo we’d hoped would whisk us away to a low carbon world won’t have shown up.  We may have a better idea of  what a limo looks like, and we will probably know what limo companies to avoid in future. But the immediate problem will be what transport is available to shift us to where we want to be.

Coal-fired power station in South Africa

My father-in-law once found himself in the back of a flat-bed with Sam Walton when nobody came to pick the Wal-Mart founder up at Bentonville airport. Business, politicians, NGOs, unions, a whole lot of us will be making use of anything that looks like it has wheels or wings and the strength to get us at least a couple more miles down the road towards climate change transformation.

My interest is companies.  Where can companies go from here? They can wait for the limo: that might seem a low risk option but when was the last time your boss accepted your excuse for being late to the meeting because the taxi didn’t show? Do you think the public, the media, governments, the workforce, your kids will be any kinder when you blame your inaction on someone else?

Or companies can buy into the ’serious doubts about the veracity of the science’ argument. If you want to explore the is it true is it false debate, the BBC has a nice primer on the for and against arguments. George Soros has repeated the argument others have made that the odds of the science being wrong are so slim that one would be foolish to bet against the odds. “If the choice is between cooking alive and wasting money unnecessarily I would rather waste some money, because long before we cook we are going to kill each other if we don’t deal with climate change.”

Or companies can figure out where to take action. Let me be clear on this: I am not talking about changing light bulbs, cutting back on packaging, or putting in insulation.  Those are good things, and they might be part of drawing a bigger picture.  But I’m interested in the bigger picture.  There are a lot of things that companies can do that will reduce carbon emissions and save the company money – that’s basic eco-efficiency, and it’s the case the CFO needs to be making.  But the action I’m talking about is what bold, imaginative but achievable steps can companies take now they’re aware the Copenhagen limo hasn’t shown?

First off (and all things considered this may not sound like great advice, but stick with me for a while) think the way the climate change politicians are thinking. They went into Copenhagen ready for five tracks of negotiation:

- mitigation

- adaptation

- finance

- technology

- long-term cooperative action

Those are five useful ways for a company to think about its climate change strategy:

- What can we do as a company that will help avoid (ie mitigate against) climate change? Light bulb changing, waste reduction, alternative energy, all of that good eco-efficiency stuff.  But take a moment and think a bit more boldly: are there other steps we could take? What is our equivalent of Wal-Mart’s commitment to revamp all of its retail stores to be powered by 100% renewable energy? Is there a statement we could make as powerful as Marks and Spencer’s announcement to drive down the use of plastic shopping bags? (Oh and if ever you doubted the hypocrisy of the media, take a look at the UK Daily Mail’s coverage of that story, first as an indicator of corporate in 2007 and then as a sign of common cause in 2008 – sometimes you need a bag to vomit into.)

But don’t just think about mitigation. While you’re figuring that out, give some thought as well to adaptation.

- What can we do as a company to get ourselves ready in case climate change gets more serious than we’d like? There’s a lot of uncertainty about what the world will look like if the temperature increases by more than 2C, but you owe it to yourself to see how those scenarios will affect you.  Tighter regulation; migration; food shortages; conflict over water: these are just some of the possible changes that will affect any business.

Thinking about mitigation and adaptation, and the way that throws up challenges and opportunities for your company will help identify the revenue and cost implications of climate change.

- How can we finance what we want to do? Marks & Spencer’s Plan A was intended to be revenue neutral, and has turned out to be profitable even in the recession. Not every company will be so lucky, but every company can look at the financing alternatives. Credits, subsidies, tax incentives, penalties, green venture capital, matching funding: these are just some of the ways a company can get its ideas funded.

- How can technology help my company? Politicians, entrepreneurs and increasingly activist groups are putting more and more emphasis on technological solutions. Partly that’s an indicator of how disappointing the climate change policy process has been, leaving us to look to things like geoengineering and alternative energy to dig us out of this hole. But every company could benefit from mapping out the technological options: the ones that exist, the ones that are likely to exist, and the ones that never will exist. What are the gaps in your strategy where you need a technological solution? What’s the likelihood of the technology coming on stream?  Will it be available and at what price?  Is my company going to be able to take advantage?

A couple of examples. First, imagine I’m in a heavy industry with manufacturing facilities in South Africa. I know that most of my energy comes from coal in one way or another. Looking ahead, it’s fair to assume I will need more of it to come from cleaner energy, either through renewable power or through coal-fired plants fitted with carbon capture and storage.  If that doesn’t happen, then I’m going to have trouble meeting my investors’ demands to show lower emissions as required under the Carbon Disclosure Project for instance. (And that’s a real threat because CDP acts on behalf of 475 institutional investors, holding $55 trillion in assets under management.) The problem is, however, that not only is coal-based energy cheap, it’s the only major source that’s readily available in South Africa. I might wish there was money going into alternative energy, but there isn’t anywhere near enough. I might want carbon capture technology to be installed but it’s too costly, not especially well proven, causes all sorts of protests from communities that live above the captured emissions, and there isn’t enough engineering expertise to make it happen in South Africa at the speed required.  Tricky, huh?

Example two has a more positive glow to it. I own palm oil processing plants in SE Asia, and I’m getting whipped from all directions because of my industry’s relationship to deforestation, loss of peat forests, threats to the orangutan and so on. If I can show I’m avoiding deforestation and even engaging in planting new forests I might be able to access new sources of capital. But right now my industry’s reputation is damaging my company’s financial prospects. I look at the options and there isn’t a high tech quick fix, but what I do have is a thousand small growers who provide a lot of my raw material (ie the oil palm kernels that I process). I notice that their yields are much lower than they could be. If I can improve their yields through some basic agricultural education, then the pressure to cut down forests should diminish without harming my productivity and while increasing the small farmers’ incomes. I will have more kernels to process, and I might even become eligible for some climate change mitigation funds.  A low cost, low tech solution with real benefits.

Mitigation, adaptation, finance and technology: that’s already a lot to think through. But not to think about what long-term collaborative action might deliver would be a missed opportunity for our company. Long-term collaborative action is behind the assault on climate change science in the run-up to COP15, but it’s also behind the P8 Group of public pension funds that has been working since 2007 to see how their industry can address climate change. And it’s behind numerous other collective actions from the well established Responsible Care initiative to the Forest Stewardship Council.

So, five parallel ways to decide what rides are available and which ones to take.  Who knows, they may even be a better alterantive to that gas-guzzling limo.

Up front, I am not jumping up and down about the Copenhagen Climate Summit or COP 15 as it’s called.  It would be nice to have a genuine worldwide commitment on tackling climate change announced when the Summit ends on 18 December.  But this has been a busy twelve months for the world’s politicians, and the stars were never properly aligned for a strong agreement. Sure Obama will attend and it’s significant that 60 other heads of government will be there, but the best we get will be a framework that is effectively an agreement that we really should try harder next time.

So, it would have been nice, but it is unlikely to happen now, and that makes it more important than ever that we think about transformation as something a lot more nuanced than regulation and targets.

That would be a good place to stop talking about COP 15.  But for anyone who has a few minutes to spend, I thought I’d jot down some of the ways the Summit has crossed my path in the last 12 months.  So, in no particular order, here are some random notes from a place that isn’t the frontline but is somewhere various troops pass on the way there.

COP NERDS AND GROUPIES: I think it was late 2008 when I went to a seminar by someone who had attended an amazing number of UN climate change meetings.  Amazing because I hadn’t realised how many meetings there were: it isn’t just the biggies like Kyoto, Bali or Copenhagen, it’s the host of warm-up ones like Bonn and the one a few weeks ago in Barcelona.

Amazing too because there is an army of people who trek from one meeting to another, and who over time have clearly become very good friends.  In fact, they understand each other so well (even when they have different opinions) that they can get annoyed at outsiders who raise awkward questions and don’t seem to understand the language the insiders use with each other.

Amazing three because the complex, cumbersome process that has been allowed to develop over the years (and which is reproduced by the groupies and nerds) has built in inertia.

That seminar, and that very evident inertia, was my epiphany moment in understanding what COP 15 would and wouldn’t achieve.  Of course, it would all change if more enlightened political leaders got on board.  Wouldn’t it?  No, because the rules of the meetings and all of the procedures mean that a wholesale shake-out of the jaded bureaucrats who were part of the old regime is nigh on impossible.  You can change the head of delegation, but not the team.

AMERICA’S ON OUR SIDE: Everyone was excited when Obama got in – Bush had exemplified climate change dopeyness and was far too close to the climate change sceptic element in business.  But it was a wake up call to share an office with a legal counsel from the Clinton adminstration and learn that fast track for a new piece of legislation on Capitol Hill would be about 18 months, meaning that without any competing items on the legislative agenda, a bill would be passed six months after COP 15.

Discouraging in itself, but the same person also pointed out that Congress does not like approving international agreements that don’t reflect what’s already US law.  Think Al Gore and Kyoto.  Think bad news for a strong agreement at COP 15.

I WILL IF YOU WILL: One early reason for despondency about what would come out of  COP 15 was that at the Poznan meeting (December 2008) key issues such as deforestation and especially REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) were kicked into the long grass.  Delay and obfuscation at the major global climate change fora inevitably had knock on effects for others.  I was invited to two meetings of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, and it was clear there that the leadership vacuum provided a ready made excuse (or a perfectly justifed reason) for delaying decisions about more sustainable palm oil production.

A LAWYER PASSES BY: Another visitor at Oxford was one of the lawyers responsible for drafting the climate change treaty.  She highlighted that with weeks to go before the treaty had to go out to consultation, almost nothing had been agreed.  It was clear it would take legal slight of hand to meet the deadline, and presumably that’s what happened because a document went out.  But a couple of months before the Summit Diana Liverman at the 4 Degrees conference showed how little had been agreed for certain, producing a slide where by my reckoning only four words of a key part of the treaty were undisputed.

DENMARK WINS THE WORLD CUP: These days the big prize in sport is not who lifts the trophy, but which city/country gets the rights to host the event in the first place.  South Africa 2010.  London 2012.  Rio 2016.  And now with tens of thousands of climate change delegates, nerds and groupies trapped in the trek of negotiations, winning the right to host a climate change summit is getting to be a big prize.  10,000 people descended on Bali in 2007.  Denmark was hoping for double that for COP 15, and hotel prices were jacked up accordingly.  But in September this year there were discounted rooms aplenty on offer.  While an agreement was not out of the question, it was unlikely to be one to celebrate, leaving us with the international summit equivalent of a Greece-Denmark cup final – no disrespect but not what the crowd wanted.

So that is my COP 15 year.  I hope friends and colleagues have a great time – Copenhagen is a very pleasant city.  But I’m not expecting to have to write much about it again.  Perhaps there will be more to say about next year’s meeting in Mexico, but in the meantime transformation might have to move ahead without the climate change summit caravan.

This month saw the publication of Helm & Hepburn’s book, Economics of Climate Change.   It is a fascinating collection of articles on economics and policy with contributors such as Nicholas Stern and Ngaire Woods.  (And if you want to see selected chapters, check out the Climates of Change working paper series.)

Overfishing

Ever since Nicholas Stern’s report for the British Government, economics has become a popular lens through which to start at climate change.  Before that, there was the science and there was the technology.  Then the economists brought their box of tricks to the party.

As soon as the effects of climate change were spelt out in the language of economists, they started to make sense to political leaders and others.  In this day and age, Economics makes things sound serious and real.  x+ y = p seems so much more inciteful than a dog screwing a bitch will cause puppies.  (I know, there are a lot of assumptions in that statement,  but assumption is the economist’s trump card.)

But I worry about the consequences of society needing the validation and insight of an economist.  Take for instance the Nobel Prize winning insight of Elinor Ostrom that Garrett Hardin’s theory of the Tragedy of the Commons is seriously flawed.  Since the 1980s if not earlier, Hardin has been target practice for first year social science students, a warm up before moving on to criticising the failings of paradigm shift theory.

Both the tragedy of the commons and paradigm shift concepts share that vital characteristic for social science criticism: they are tightly presented ideas that seem to offer insight into a particular problem, but much more importantly are highly suited to debate and refutation.  Karl Marx or Kierkegaard are far too complex and slippery to serve this function.  Social science criticism at this level doesn’t value insight; it’s only interested in debatability.

And all of that is fine: learner drivers need practice circuits, after all.  But things go horribly wrong when practice circuits are mistaken for real highways.  A Nobel laureate’s application of the economist’s arsenal is not particularly noteworthy given the work that had preceded it, but I worry that the very fact an economist wins a Noble prize for work on the Tragedy of the Commons perversely gives this moribund theory renewed credibility.  Likewise, three decades worth of criticism of the value of Kuhn’s theory risks being ignored when journalists or natural scientists latch onto it because of the catchy title, and use it as if it adds to our understanding.

I’m putting off my campaign to end the Nobel Prize for Economics to focus on more pressing priorities.  But I would ask that we think carefully about the mental equipment we employ to wrestle with climate change – not because any one way of thinking is necessarily wrong, but because we’d be mistaken to think any single way was right.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks.  All around, people are caught up in the frenzied run up to the Copenhagen.  Will there, won’t there be an agreement?  Is it better to have one or not?  There’s lots of blogging on this as you can imagine, and I’ll just flag up one of my colleague’s, Dan Bodansky, who has been at the preparatory meeting in Barcelona.  But I’ve been keeping well clear of that, spending time with various companies and observing how their efforts on climate change are faring.

First off, I was invited to a meeting by a major multinational food company that unfortunately needs to remain nameless for reasons that will become apparent.  Around the table were representatives of major supermarkets this company supplied as well as the sustainbility folk from other food businesses, and some sustainability consultants and experts.  The aim was to help our host think through how what it needed to pay attention to in order to be considered a responsible corporate citizen.  And so we talked about the farmers and farmworkers, transportation, consumer interests, sustainable agriculture and so on.

And that’s fine except the guerilla in the room is whether or not retailers are prepared to support a supplier’s commitment to sustainability by offering better prices, longer term contracts, and other incentives.  Someone eventually put that on the table and we shuffled about it for a while like it was vomit on a student union dance floor.  The evening moved on and we went our separate ways.  Only then did an old friend mention that the real guerilla in the room was the fact that that very day, this supplier had had its contract cancelled by a major retailer and was pulling out of the UK market completely.  Of course, that retailer was there for the meeting and said nothing.  At one point they might even have said that buyers – the people who decide whether a deal goes through or not – no longer ruled ruled retail.  That is simply untrue, and not only do they rule retail, they have an enormous say in how the sustainability agenda unfolds.  It’s not easy to find out about what really happens but a former buyer turned researcher, Pamela Robinson, has started to publish on this theme.  Well worth a read.

Second event, I was invited to moderate a session of the Executive Board of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil in Kuala Lumpur.  For some people, palm oil and sustainability is an oxymoron of the highest order as a quick glance at the Greenpeace website shows. But the membership of RSPO, made up as it is of NGOs like Oxfam and WWF, palm oil users such as Unilever and Carrefour, and palm oil producers from giants such as Sime Darby to hundreds of thousand of smallholders, shows that this is a complex industry confronting a multi-faceted problem.  In the context of climate change, the creation of oil palm plantations has been closely linked to tropical deforestation where much of the potential for emissions abatement lies, and especially with the destruction of peatlands that are an important natural store of carbon dioxide.  Plantations are also often portrayed as a threat to endangered wildlife such as the orang-utan and Sumatran rhinocerous.  Yet palm oil is a high yield plant compared to other sources of vegetable oil, and curtailing production in one tropical area might lead to increased deforestation elsewhere (e.g. due to increased planting of lower yielding soybeans in Brazil).  Production is also an important source of employment in some rural areas with industry estimates of 1.5 million smallholders in Indonesia, and 500,000 people employed in Malaysia. Furthermore, the recent growth in production is associated with palm oil’s use as a biofuel, with the potential to reduce the need for carbon-based fuels, but with the risk that increased production will lead to further deforestation.  Oil palm  production has been an economic success story, notably in Malaysia and Indonesia, even if the rapid growth in plantations and smallholdings has been controversial.  Even with an issue such as food, palm oil is at once a major source of edible oil that could help avert food shortages, but it is also high in saturated fats connected with obesity.

RSPO is an ambitious attempt to tackle a very difficult problem.  Even if you don’t accept the industry’s right to exist, it would be fanciful to think it will vanish overnight: pension funds, national governments, consumers, and major companies would not allow it.  So the headlines in the run up to the November Roundtable where 800 people were due to gather were unnerving to say the least. Various newspapers and websites proclaimed RSPO was in the brink of collapse because its different factions could not agree about how to address the industry’s greenhouse gas emissions.  There are a lot of stories to tell about how they got into that situation and how they resolved it, but suffice to say RSPO stepped back from the brink. Some NGOs might be frustrated at what they see as a ‘toothless’ agreement on how to move forwards, but that is to ignore the very real tensions that threatened to derail RSPO completely, leaving a vacuum that would be replaced with …. ? Well, nobody knows the answer to that, only that the alternatives did not look good.

And what does all this tell us?  The main point for me is that we can hector companies and industries all we want that they simply must change, but the levers that govern the speed and direction of change lie within industries and their value chains, often hidden away from the public’s gaze. It is important to hector and shout, but sometimes it can be as effective to whisper and snoop so that we can find the true hot spots where change can be invoked.