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Monday, 8 February 2010
London Book Reception (& other book stuff)
Another successful, if smaller, reception for The Three Secrets of Green Business in London last Thursday night. A slightly different mix of friends, colleagues, business folk, journalists and interested others showed up. Thanks must go to LBi for providing the venue, and publishers Earthscan for their contribution to refreshments and for tidying up afterwards (as I was dragged off for a celebratory Brick Lane curry).Interesting questions again - the killer being "in what timeframe should companies act?" That's a really hard one to answer as some sectors can re-invent themselves in a couple of years if not months (eg smart phones, web 2.0) whereas others take decades to transform (eg the energy sector). I usually suggest to clients that they aim to transform themselves over a 5-10 year period, as I find this to be far enough in the future to consider major changes, but not so far ahead that people make unrealistic assumptions about technology. The guy who asked the question pointed out that in Japan 30 year planning is perfectly normal and suggested that's what we should be pursuing in the West. I'll have to mull on that one as it asks all sorts of questions about culture differences.
I also found time in London to interview Jim Hagan, CSR supremo at GSK, for The Green Executive, and have a meeting with the organiser of the Business and Sustainable Environment (BASE) conference in March. I'll be doing a couple of sessions at the latter and I hope to be able to offer a discount to partners and subscribers to The Low Carbon Agenda.
It was really nice to find 5 minutes to drop into Blackwell's on Charing Cross Road and see The Three Secrets on the shelves for the first time (although I had to remind myself that they didn't belong to me despite having my name on the cover). Blackwell's had 4 shelves of green business/CSR books, so the competition is heating up. As an aside, now I'm in the market, I've decided that it would be a conflict of interest to review similar books here in the future - particularly as I can be a rather harsh critic. So book reviews will be limited to books related to business and sustainability but which have a different focus.
Lastly, the local press did a nice piece on the book (and me) on Saturday.
Labels: books, seminars, three secrets of green business
# posted by Gareth Kane : 09:45
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Monday, 13 July 2009
Book Review: The Solar Economy by Hermann Scheer
German MP and Solar Champion Hermann Scheer wrote this book about 10 years ago and it has been available in English for about 7 years, but apart from a few historical references, there is little out of date about this book. Scheer was responsible for introducing feed-in legislation in Germany which has been responsible for a huge boost in the uptake of renewables and the supporting renewables industry.The book can be a bit difficult to read, partly due to a slightly clunky style and partly due to Scheer's tendency to go off on a rant about something he feels strongly about in the middle of a well argued point. But his main arguments are:
1. There is a prevailing myth that non-renewable sources of energy will support us for ever and that renewable sources cannot. The earth receives 15,000 times as much solar energy as man uses in any year, so it is up to our ingenuity to capture and use as much of this as we need.
2. International agreements such as the Kyoto agreement are a dangerous distraction as they encourage individual nations to delay action, and the compromises inherent in such an agreement leads to the lowest common denominator being adopted rather than a race to see who can do best.
3. The current energy infrastructure is designed to take a number of highly concentrated forms of energy and distributing them to a diffuse number of users. Renewable energy is diffuse and the most efficient way of using it is directly at source (eg a house using the electricity generated on its roof). This requires a completely different distribution system and localised storage systems.
4. As a result of this mismatch, energy statistics are flawed as they omit existing autonomous renewable energy systems (eg domestic solar hot water systems, wood burning stoves, solar powered calculators, solar powered road signs etc) and passive renewable energy use, such as passive solar gain of housing and natural daylighting.
5. The fossil (and nuclear) fuel industries are over-subsidised and are given near monopoly control over some markets. These vested interests must be confronted and routed out before solar can thrive. Existing energy companies should bear the societal costs of their industry.
6. Solar resources (biomaterials, biofuels) can and should replace their oil-based equivalents without disrupting food supplies. Given the recent outcry over food prices and the effect on them of biofuel production, this is one of the few places in the book where it showed its age.
So, instead of the big centralised distribution systems (which are becoming global in many cases), Scheer proposes a localised system of distribution grids, owned by local and regional authorities (Scheer believes that privatisation should only occur where competition is possible). Feed-In Legislation would guarantee grid access for small scale generators, breaking up the dominance of big energy companies. He also proposes the grid operators could also provide other solar resources including biofuels and biochemicals, but I felt that this might be where his politics overstepped his logic - there is no practical reason why there shouldn't be competition in the supply and distribution of vehicle fuel and solid fuels.
It was very appropriate to be reading this book on various train trips in Belgium where I could see the really positive effect of a feed-in tariff. As I said before it can be a bit clunky and a bit ranty in places, but this is still a very stimulating and thought provoking read from one of the true champions of renewable energy.
Labels: books, hermann scheer, renewable energy, solar photovoltaic
# posted by Gareth Kane : 05:13
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Wednesday, 20 May 2009
Book Review: Blueprint for a Safer Planet by Nicholas Stern
Nicholas Stern's 2006 eponymous report has been credited with taking the climate change debate out of academic and green circles and into the 'real world' of economics (given what has happened to the world economy since, there is some irony in it being seen as more 'real' than the piece of rock we're all sat on). This book builds on that report to present a way forward to "a new era of progress and prosperity" as the tagline of the book would have it. It is clearly written for the benefit of those attending or sending delegations to the crucial Copenhagen COP15 conference later this year which will attempt to form a post-Kyoto international climate change agreement.Stern's main point is that climate change is market failure on a grand scale. By fixing the market - putting a realistic price on the value of carbon and providing an effective trading mechanism - the economy can decarbonise itself, protect forests and go some way to dealing with global inequalities. It is the first point which is most controversial. Stern argues that to discount future costs of climate change is unethical despite it being common practice for most forms of investment (discounting accounts for the fact that if I offered you £10 today or £11 next year, you'd probably take the tenner right now). This is a question I naively asked 10 years ago on an academic environmental economics forum. I sat back while several eminent contributors started slinging increasingly puerile insults at each other across the ether, and unsurprisingly Stern got quite a bit of stick for this aspect of his original report. Personally, I'm with him on this - if we're going to take the intergenerational equality aspect of sustainable development seriously, then we can't discount the negative impacts that later generations are going to face.
My only criticism of the book is its readability. The sentences are long and have multiple subclauses, the paragraphs are rarely enlivened by either bullet points or metaphors and there is a lack of recap or summary at key places to help the reader. The chapter on ethics and discounting is particularly poor on this front which is a shame as this is where the reader needs to concentrate most. While this may not be a problem for the two-brained bureaucrats it is aimed at, it turned what should have been a very informative read into a real chore. I've since read Vince Cable's excellent book on the current economic situation ("The Storm
") in a fraction of the time and retained much more of the content.So, overall, this is an exceedingly important contribution to tackling climate change and it should be on the reading list for everyone involved in COP15. It's just a shame it wasn't more accessible for the rest of us.
Labels: blueprint for a safer planet, books, climate change, low carbon economy, nicholas stern
# posted by Gareth Kane : 06:41
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Friday, 9 January 2009
Book Review: Sustainability By Design
Warning: don't be fooled by the cute sunflower on the cover, or the modest page count, John Ehrenfeld's Sustainability by Design
is the most intellectually rigorous treatment of sustainability that I have ever come across.Ehrenfeld's diagnosis of the earth's problems is that we have become addicted to Having. The addiction analogy is a great one - we want more and more stuff even though we know that getting any of it will not satisfy us for long and only make us crave more. He then uses systems theory to argue that eco-efficiency, corporate social responsibility and (the standard view* of) sustainable development won't get us out of this addiction.
Instead he proffers and deconstructs a new definition of sustainability as "the possibility that humans and other life will flourish on the Earth forever". In particular the word 'flourish' is included to force home the idea that sustainability is not just a lack of unsustainability, but much more ambitious and positive than that. Drawing on the work of thinkers such as Heidegger, Fromm and Maturana, he argues we must move from our addiction to Having to a state of Being. To this we need to disrupt our current patterns of behaviour and he gives a range of examples of how that might be achieved.
The simplest of these is the two button toilet flush. By providing a decision point (high volume or low volume flush?) this product makes us stop and question why would we want to use more or less water and therefore links us (however briefly) to the natural world and the pressures upon it. He calls this disruption of our habits and routine by products 'presencing'. The disruption principle is also applied to the design of organisations and governance structures. Of course Ehrenfeld cannot provide all the answers within a 215 page book, but this work provides a context and springboard for the next generation of sustainable solutions.
Despite the approachable and open writing style, this a challenging read as it covers a lot of ground very quickly and the philosophical and linguistic concepts behind the arguments can be hard to grasp if you are coming to them for the first time as I was. It certainly disrupted my thinking on sustainability and has given me a deeper understanding of the principles - particularly on the consumption side of the coin.
In short: quite brilliant, but be prepared for an intensive intellectual workout!
* I define sustainable development as the process of achieving sustainability (so this work would be part of that process), but Ehrenfeld uses the standard definitions (eg meeting today's needs without compromising the needs of future generations).
Labels: books, eco-product, ehrenfeld, sustainability, sustainable production and consumption
# posted by Gareth Kane : 08:00
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Wednesday, 8 October 2008
Book Review: The Necessary Revolution - Peter Senge et al
The lead author of "The Necessary Revolution
" is Peter Senge - the author of "The Fifth Discipline", a famous book about creating learning organisations. Along with two change management colleagues, Bryan Smith and Nina Kruschwitz, and two sustainability bods, Joe Laur and Sara Schley, Senge brings his thinking to bear on the biggest of all challenges, creating a sustainable world.First impressions were great - a brilliant start setting out the problem and some fantastic case studies demonstrating how some people have managed to find solutions, and in particular "never doubt what one person & a small group of conspirators can do" about how small seeds can grow into powerful networks for change. Examples included the creation of the LEED green building protocol in the US and the setting up of Green Zones in Sweden, based around green fuels.
However I felt that the promised 'how to' and 'toolbox' parts of the book are a bit vague and sparse. The best lesson I drew from these sections was the power of inquiry over advocacy (if your boss thinks sustainability isn't a priority, don't tell him he's wrong, but ask him what if he's wrong), but I didn't feel I was being armed with a tool box of techniques to make change happen. There's also a tendency to illustrate an intellectual argument with a very lengthy anecdote which never quite nails the point down. And, then after all the 'bottom up' arguments (inquiry, small groups, building networks etc), we're suddenly told on p337 "Start from the top down". I didn't get the relevance of most of the points in the last part "The Future" either - the anecdote of Amory Lovins designing a monkey house with the help of the residents (inmates?) was amusing, but left me baffled as to what I was meant to draw from this.
Having started so well - as good as Lovins' superlative Natural Capitalism
in places - I was left feeling more than a little shortchanged on the toolbox front - particularly as the authors' intellectual firepower is biased towards change management. A flawed gem - get it for the case studies, anecdotes and inspiration - but don't expect too much in the way of new technique.Labels: books, change management, peter senge, the necessary revolution
# posted by Gareth Kane : 08:00
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Wednesday, 30 July 2008
Book Review: The Green Marketing Manifesto
I don't think a book has left me so polarised in opinion as The Green Marketing Manifesto by John Grant.First off, Grant really knows his stuff - and has left me with some strong ideas like his cool, succinct definition:
"Green Marketing is about making green stuff seem normal, not about making normal stuff seem green"
and the Five I's of Green Marketing:
- Intuitive,
- Integrative (sustainability, technology, commerce),
- Innovative,
- Inviting (not hair shirt),
- Informed.
Unfortunately, instead of developing the 5Is, Grant presents a 3x3 grid of concepts versus green-ness and then for each of the squares, he presents two different strategies - 18 in all. This complexity would be OK in a text book, but Grant can never decide whether he is writing an academic treatise, a how-to, or a polemic. There are a number of factual errors (eg Jedi wasn't adopted as an official religion after the 2001 census) and in my opinion Grant bestows green blogs with too much influence - OK, Treehugger.com is important in Green circles, but the average Joe in the street won't have heard of it, let alone have read its criticisms of Anya Hindmarsh's I am not a plastic bag, er, bag. Towards the end, he gets sidetracked into inventing examples of more innovative products/services, but fails to describe how these innovations would be sold to the consumer. The surplus of exclamation marks suggests the book needs a good edit! And the cover (plain card with a drab green hand stencilled text) goes against his own advice by being more hairshirt than inviting.
I would have much rather he stuck with the 5I's and showed how they could/have been applied to a series of green products and services. Instead we have a very clever book which has got rather too caught up in its own cleverness.
Despite all these criticisms, I still really enjoyed most of it, learnt loads, and would recommend it as there is nothing else better out there. Let's just hope that the second edition is simpler, better edited and that the facts have been checked.
Labels: books, green marketing
# posted by Gareth Kane : 07:00
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Wednesday, 16 July 2008
Surely Harvard Can Do Better Than This?
There's no such thing as an environmental expert, no matter what the media (or my CV...) says. The topic is too broad, deep and fast evolving for one person to know everything there is to know. But I keep ahead of the game by gaining experience on the ground, learning from others at events and reading periodicals and books.A month or so ago I picked up the "Harvard Business Review On Green Business Strategy" and I've finally got around to reading it. Extracted from the HBR journal and published in 2007, I thought this would give me an insight into the latest business school thinking... how wrong I was. Only two articles of the eight were published after 2000 and one of these is a rather bland piece on green building.
OK, so there was a revolution in Green Business thinking in 1996-1999, but surely one of the most prestigious journals on business could come up with eight recent provocative or insightful pieces on this massive business challenge?
I'm still reading it as a bit of revision never hurt anyone, but I am distinctly underwhelmed.
Labels: books, green business
# posted by Gareth Kane : 07:00
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A highly accessible, practical guide to those who want to introduce sustainability into their business or organization quickly and effectively.
