Original Author Martin Porter
So it begins, COP21 in Paris. And there is reason to be optimistic.
We might get a deal, it might ward off the worst of Climate Change. We
might be able to build on it to keep global warming to acceptable
levels. Well, it’s possible, but it’s not certain, and in no small part
this is because the great and the good appear to have contracted the
dangerous disease of optimism.
Is optimism a failing? Not usually.
On the contrary it’s a great trait to have in an employee. However when
the people at the top leave uncertain reality behind for rose tinted
certainties, you’ve got problems.
If you want an example of the perils of optimism look no further than
the Iraq War. Why
an oil funded ignoramus like George W Bush blundered into Iraq is not
that much of a mystery. However why the US army, whose Top Brass boast
almost as many M.A.s as medals, continued to believe it could rescue his
failed venture when all the evidence was they couldn’t can only be
explained by the Army’s institutional ‘can do’ optimism. The result is a
failed state, the rise of Daesh and the atrocities in Paris and
elsewhere.
The Iraq disaster though pails into insignificance compared to the dangers of getting Climate Change wrong.
Many of my fellow environmental campaigners though fail to understand
the way business leaders think about the problem. The perception is that
they are all fossil fools, believing climate change denial conspiracy
theories and desperately trying to avoid the problem. There are
certainly a few like that – far too many in fact – but for most business
leaders if you ask them about Climate Change they will say it’s a
problem and here’s how we’re going to solve it: we do this, this and
this. Easy
The problem is that their beliefs are usually wildly optimistic at best, and actually delusional at worst.
During
my brief career as a gatecrasher to corporate shindigs I’ve heard
C-Suite optimists from construction companies tell me in all seriousness
how sustainable their companies will be even as they are covering the
countryside with tarmac and I’ve had smiley faced board members from BP tell me
how they will move into solar power and make a killing in Renewables.
Instead they moved into tar sands and they did their killing in the Gulf
of Mexico.
However the deluded optimist-in-chief of this army of faux climate
warriors is bearded wonder Richard Branson. In 2006, after Al Gore
converted him to the cause, he pledged $3 billion to the fight against
Climate Change. In 2009 he launched the Carbon War Room to teach
business how to make money by cutting emissions and in 2010 he announced
the Virgin Earth Challenge.
All of which sounds wonderful until you realise that Virgin airlines now
emits 40% more Greenhouse gases than it did when Al Gore gave Branson
that personal PowerPoint, whilst the $25 million prize for inventing
something to suck them out of the atmosphere again has still not been
awarded. Only 10% of his promised money has appeared, although as
Branson’s personal wealth increase by over $2 billion, the Carbon War
Room has achieved 50% success.
It’s an inconvenient truth that straight after meeting Gore, Branson
launched a new air route to Dubai and before Carbon War Room opened its
doors Virgin America took to the air. He’s also bought a Formula One
team, tried to launch an exploding space plane and increased his own
personal carbon footprint to the size of a small island by relocating to
a tax haven in the Caribbean.
So like the War on Terror, Branson’s pre-emptive strike on Climate Change only seems to have made the problem worse.
But back to Paris, and those business leaders hoping to lead the way to a low carbon future. As I blogged the other week,
even the IPCCs own plans have been hijacked by the optimists, with the
scenarios in its Synthesis Report being based on either time travel or
imaginary technologies. However it isn’t just the IPCC that has problems
with reality.
Most industries have a plan of sorts on how to move to a low carbon economy and, as I said, most
CEOs you meet are wildly optimistic about theirs. Unfortunately, taken together, they are a disaster.
The shipping industry, for example, is going to run on biofuels. So is the car industry, and the aviation industry. The US Navy has already tried biomass. Do you see the problem here?
A back-of-a-postcard calculation suggests that for everyone to do this
would require 50% of the world’s agricultural land to be converted to
biofuels. Even if half the world would agree to stop eating in order to
allow the other half to carry on consuming, there is no way we could
build the infrastructure required in realistic time frame.
It’s a similar story with nuclear power, which Bill Gates is gambling on
despite the eye watering costs, or Carbon Capture and Storage, which
has never been tried on an industrial scale but which features in almost
everyone’s plans, and so on.
So am I advocating pessimism then? No, I’m certainly not. Climate Change
is not an insoluble problem. We can beat it, but we need to change.
Forget flying. A Virgin train produces 90% less emissions than a Virgin
plane. Forget biofuels. One wind turbine incidentally creates as much
power as 2000 hectares of biomass. Above all forget endless economic
growth. Lets redistribute what we have and all live happier lives. There
are people in Paris advocating just that, but they are mostly on the
other side of the barricades to the optimists, if they are not under house arrest. Meanwhile inside the security cordon the lobbyists are telling the politicians that we can beat Climate Change and make money.
Maybe pessimism from world’s business would be infinitely worse, but then people tend
to ignore sourpusses. The deluded optimist though has the power, like
the Pied Piper of Hamlin, to lead us all to our doom.
