No.72 - April 2009

Fingers on buzzers, here’s your starter for ten.

Which government’s economic recovery package contains the highest proportion of spending allocated to green initiatives? Sweden, perhaps? Or Germany? No, you can forget the usual suspects. The answer, according to analysts at HSBC,
is South Korea. It has allocated a cool 81% of its fiscal stimulus to green industries – notably in the energy field. The UK, by comparison, manages just 7% – barely half that of the US.

Now, this doesn’t mean that Seoul is over ten times as keen as Britain to fight against climate change. Far from it. Anyone familiar with the Korean capital will know that this is hardly a city which oozes environmental concern from every pore. Rather, its mammoth commitment simply suggests that the Koreans are doing what they’ve done repeatedly, with striking success, over the last four decades: spotting the emerging trends in the world economy, and pouring in resources to make sure their leading companies catch the wave.

By contrast, Britain is looking almost wilfully sluggish. Here’s a warning from a man named Stern. “How good will the business judgement of companies look in five, ten, or twenty years’ time, when it becomes clear [that] high carbon goods and services have simply become
untenable?” Familiar stuff, perhaps, but this isn’t Lord Stern of Stern Report fame. It’s his namesake, Todd – Special Envoy for Climate Change at the US State Department.

So with even the Americans seizing the day, it’s no wonder that business leaders on this side of the pond are getting impatient. In the words of Richard Lambert, director-general of the CBI: “The government should get on with it.” Otherwise, he warns, billions of pounds of investment will leak away to America and Asia. It’s an impatience echoed by everyone from Lord (yes, that one) Stern [‘Briefings’, p9], to the UK’s leading transport chiefs [‘Peak Time Travel’, pp 10-13].

But where big business and government falter, light-footed entrepreneurs grab their chance. As Ed Crooks points out in ‘Small is ambitious’ (p32): “It’s rarely the large established companies that come up with revolutionary ideas – they have too much invested in the status quo”. (This might, incidentally, be a crumb of comfort to those of us who have watched askance as BP and Shell reverse with indecent haste out of their commitments to solar and wind.) Instead, says Crooks, it’s the smaller, sharper operators who have the imagination to come up with the sort of innovative breakthroughs we so urgently need.

It’s exactly these breakthroughs which are highlighted in ‘The cooker, the cow and the carbon capture’ [pp30-32], which profiles the five shortlisted entrants to the FT Climate Change Challenge, staged jointly by Forum for the Future and the Financial Times.

Among them is what’s intriguingly referred to as “a microwave for biochar”. For some, biochar is the ‘killer app’ the world’s been waiting for in the fight against climate change. For others, it’s a disastrous false trail which could lead to massive deforestation and worsening
poverty. In ‘Burn the trees to save the world?’ [pp26-29], Chris Goodall sets out the potential and the pitfalls of this beguilingly simple technology. It promises to be a long and impassioned debate – and it’s only just beginning.