“Governance” and “interesting” used to be contradictory terms for most IR people. However, I went to a private lunch hosted by Tomorrows Company and Radley Yeldar which managed to combine both.

The point of the event was to allow a high quality group to debate the ‘stewardship’ of companies, and a potential disconnect of interests between ownership and the long term success of the company.

Tomorrows Company had produced an interesting perspective which graded degrees of stewardship, from the original founders of businesses with the highest degree of stewardship instincts, to speculators – members of the ‘casino’ economy, rather than the real one, with the lowest. The use of derivatives by these speculators to leverage investment without transparency has been an important contributor to this disconnect.

The UK Government’s roadmaps for meeting its environmental targets provide a new and important piece of the complex global jigsaw of technologies, policies and business models needed to overcome climate change and usher in a new economic era.

In an area full of huge challenges, one consolation is that the elements of the solution are all available. Science provides the understanding of climate change needed to inform policy. Policies, ranging from emissions trading to support for renewable energy to vehicle and building regulations, are available to reward clean energy and penalise carbon emissions. And at the end of this chain, businesses stand ready with the green products and services that form the building blocks of the future – from wind turbines to bicycles, smart grids to ultra-efficient industrial motors.

What has been missing is the implementation. And that of course requires courage and co-ordination between the players in the chain – scientists, policy-makers, business leaders and investors.

The 40th anniversary of the moon landings has inevitably prompted comparison with the current effort to preserve Planet Earth from global warming. As Ed Miliband has noted both missions involve combining political will with examples of technological leapfrog.  

One sobering contrast, however, is that although serious resources are now being deployed in green investments, the central co-ordination of the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and overcome climate change is still pitifully resourced compared to what was spent on Houston.   The world lacks an ‘e-mission control’.

Will carbon pricing work to shift behaviour away from carbon intensive activities and towards a low carbon future? The answer is I don’t know. The more worrying answer is neither does anyone else.
 

We had the launch of our pamphlet, Tomorrow’s Climate: Beyond Peak Carbon at the Institution of Civil Engineers last night. It went well, good speakers (Lord Smith and our very own David Vigar) and good attendance