Earth Day: 40 Years On

Posted by Rupert on Apr 22nd, 2010 | no comments home title

About the Author: During more than two decades as a consultant and entrepreneur in business and sustainability, Rupert Davis has worked at the investor, owner, board and chief executive levels. Today, as global head of MontaRosa’s Sustainability Practice, Rupert combines his finance background with a unique understanding of long-term environmental business engagement issues, including climate change action, triple bottom line entrepreneurship and clean tech development. Read more from this author

Forty years ago the first Earth Day was declared in San Francisco. From the point of view of avoiding dangerous climate change the prognosis is dire (just reading the latest, non-politicized, consensus science from such places as Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, Beijing, Tokyo and Copenhagen Universities is utterly frightening). Still, looking at where we are now compared to where we were then, there has been an enormous amount of progress.

Celebrating Earth Day today caused me to think about graduating from high school, when I went to live in an Australian rainforest to build an off-the-grid micro-hydro system as a direct climate change action when I couldn’t convince Cambridge University that pricing externalities was important in their undergraduate economics curricula. Things have changed.

In 1986 the thought of having climate change and environmental news regularly on the front pages of the globe’s leading newspapers seemed an impossible dream. Having governments legislate literally hundreds of billions of dollars around the globe for green investment seemed an impossible dream. Having 25% of all venture capital pouring into clean tech, helping entire industries to flourish, driven by major companies like GE, IBM and Siemens seemed an impossible dream. And having the world’s largest procurers (Wal-Mart and the U.S. Government) running strict sustainability criteria through their supply chains would have been pure fantasy.

But the reality is that change is happening.

The reality is that with the profitable green retrofit of major iconic structures like the Empire State Building – resulting in a 30%+ annual internal rate of return – the mainstream is realizing how much energy, emissions and money are to be saved through smartening up buildings.

In transport, airlines are experimenting with bio-fuelled flights, entire cities are committing to electrified vehicle networks and best practice efficiency tactics from the world’s largest transporters like UPS are starting to filter out. Nissan just brought out their first 100% electric mainstream consumer vehicle – the Leaf – on sale in November.

In power generation the scale of production in China is bringing down solar electricity pricing to grid parity, and wind has already been doing well for a number of years. The EU is (slowly) starting to execute on the potential of marine and offshore wind in the north. Large scale solar thermal shows renewed interest and promise in desert regions.

Is any of this enough? Probably not to avoid the worst of it.

Because the fact remains that we are on a tiny and fragile planet using up resources at alarming speeds and perhaps more worryingly undermining the very life support systems that all of us – rich and poor, developed and developing nations, North and South, East and West, men and women and children, businesses and civil society – depend on. As China and India and the like take their rightful place on the global stage the planet becomes that much smaller, and human impact becomes that much worse.

Externalities, as it turns out, are important. Indeed, they are crucial. If we don’t have clean air, if we don’t have a stable global temperature, if we don’t have potable water, if we don’t have healthy oceans that support the base of the food chain, if we don’t have enough trees to sink carbon, maintain soil coverage, filter and catch water, then life is going to become very painful very quickly for many of us. Where these effects are already happening – many point to the Sudan as an example – mass migration, resource conflict, refugees, disease and hunger are the consequence. It doesn’t take too much imagination to extrapolate such regional conflicts globally.

From the perspective of the early ‘70s all this may not seem very new. At that time there was a wave of enthusiasm for environmental responsibility. Yet the people who were part of the first Earth Day saw all that enthusiasm wane with the political cycle – so that by the time I was graduating high school in the ‘80s – environmentalism was seen as a fringe, far left concern. Is that going to happen again? Are all the positive changes that we are seeing in 2010 going to fall away?

I remain hopeful that this time around the change is more culturally embedded and that it won’t be entirely subject to the vagaries of political fashion. The environment has become a major part of early education. Young people today are much more aware and concerned about these issues. And with social networks, the Internet and mobile communications, they are both more informed and more powerful.

And business is a powerful agent of change, perhaps the most powerful. When large companies take this seriously, when they see the opportunity to make money doing it, when the incentives support green and sustainable and penalize the non-sustainable, when externalities do start to get priced in, then as we are seeing, change can happen swiftly. Just looking at life before and after the internet, or before and after the mobile phone, gives us a sense of how fast change can happen. When you take a broader historical perspective, considering say the changes from pre to post Scientific Revolution in the sixteenth/seventeenth century, or pre to post Industrial in the nineteenth/twentieth, it is clear that major, almost unthinkable changes in social and economic systems are possible. My sense/hope is that our current digital revolution will soon be surpassed in extent and pace by the sustainability revolution.

So there is hope. And one sign of that is that the U.S. Army is starting to take green seriously – and I don’t mean camouflage! We’ll talk about that – and the strategic lessons for business – in the next blog.

In the meantime, Happy Earth Day…and keep up the good work!

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