E3G

The impact of climate change on business

By Tom Burke

I need to make something clear before I get to the substance of my remarks, however, as the programme says and as Peter introduces me I am an advisor to Rio Tinto, and what the programme does not say, I am also an advisor to the British Foreign Office – and a great many other people. But nothing I say should be interpreted as speaking for any of the organisations that I advice. They are all quite capable of speaking for themselves indeed, Charlie Lenegen, who is here, will be speaking for Rio Tinto later in the programme.

There was a famous moment which I very well remember in the Thatcher years when journalists managed to get very confused over whether her personal economic advisor or the then chancellor of the exchequer, actually was speaking about the government’s environmental policy. And that nonsense only stopped when Walters finally reminded everybody that advisors advise, ministers decide. That’s the only lesson I have taken very much to heart as somebody who’s spent a lot of his life giving advice. I have also learnt by the way that the fact that advice is given in no way means that it is taken – something every parent learns, I am afraid, the hard way.

My task this morning is to give you the best advice I can on the magnitude and urgency of the climate problem, and of the nature and scale of the political challenge it poses to us all.

Three decades as an environmentalist have given me a particularly good preparation for this task. As an environmentalist, leading figures in all walks of life have gone out of their way to correct what they saw as my errors of fact or judgement about their relationship to the environment. The result, apart from a giving me a rather superior post-graduate education, is that I have had the opportunity to work in business and government as well as with the environmental NGOs.

This is relevant to today’s debate only in that it informs very strongly my view that successfully meeting the challenge of climate change is going to require all three actors to work together much more closely, and much more cleverly, in the future than they have managed to do in the past. Each brings something very distinctive, and essential, to the party. Government brings authority and resources to get things done, business above all brings the means of delivering on the goals, NGOs bring the trust of the public, which business and governments don’t always have, and the ability to mobilise in the base of society. And this problem is going to require mobilisation in the base of society.

Now it is a striking paradox that a problem that – unlike literally any other problem – will directly affect the well-being and security of every single person. Every single one of the six and a half billion of us on the planet, should produce such rancorous division within and between nations. Where we should be pulling together in the face of a common threat, there has been a pulling apart. Blame, denial and finger pointing. That pulling apart has occupied the space that should have been filled by concern, collaboration, imagination and enthusiasm.