Hard to imagine after the environmental impact and the financial cost, but is there a sunny side to the Gulf oil spill that has implicated BP, Transocean and Haliburton? Setting aside the beating dealt out to pension funds around the world by the collapsing share price, and the PR humiliations of BP executives (note to [...]
Economist and business expert John Kay has a new book out called Obliquity. The main message is that we have got too caught up in numbers and measurement, and this has left us pursuing goals whose main justification seems to be that they can be spelt out in equations. Kay calls this ‘bogus rationalisation’ and [...]
Here is Matin Chilcott, climate change entrepeneur and CEO of 2Degrees, wrote on the Smith School blog about the business and climate change conference held in Oxford last week. Nowadays, I can sometimes feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the task we face to address climate change. But it takes being in the company of [...]
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. Why? Because it is one of those rare moments in history when ethical arguments eventually trumped economic ones. At least that’s the argument [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I’m still on holiday so instead of the normal fortnightly posting, I’m rethinking, revamping and reposting a couple of blogs from earlier in the year. In May, I posted about the strong but typically overlooked ethical dimension to climate change theories. As you know, my summer reading has included Mike Hulme’s fascinating book, “Why we [...]
It’s holiday time so instead of the fortnightly posting, I’m rethinking, revamping and reposting a couple of blogs from earlier in the year. In May, I posted some thoughts about how Charles Darwin’s use of the word economy to mean “the mutually useful and apparently ‘economical’ mechanisms connecting living beings are understood as purposefully designed.” [...]
Green venture capitalist John Doerr says that America must win the race to dominate the new green economy. Is it just silliness to wonder which countries in previous wars would have talked in terms of global leadership, the must-win race and the supremacy of one country’s people? What horse are we backing here?