Qualityworld
Backchat: Dan Green
This July rained cats and dogs. I have two reasons to be miffed at this season's weather. The first is that summer is my favourite season before the tedious inevitability of gloomy autumn days.
The second reason has to do with climate change. There has been a dawning realisation over the last year and a half in our weather-obsessed country that human-induced climate change presents a genuine challenge. There's a national debate of sorts, with a massive increase in media interest about energy policy, our buying habits, the way we travel and so on.
My concern is with the fickleness of our national psyche. The UK Climate Impacts Partnership predicts that a warmer climate will mean milder, wetter winters and hot, dry summers. Exactly like 2006, but not exactly like June and July 2007. One soggy summer and the media might start entertaining doubts, even as the science becomes increasingly compelling. It's not as if I wish crippling drought on the nation, but to stop taking this threat seriously would be a disaster.
The fact is that unseasonable weather is not necessarily a symptom of a complex, global trend. Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans starkly underlined the effects of weather systems becoming more turbulent and it's not surprising people sat up and took notice. What would have been harder to predict was that a painstaking government report produced by an economist (the Stern Review) and a film about a US politician's lecture on climate change (Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth) would have major repercussions as well.
Mind-bogglingly, concern about carbon emissions now appears in stories about how many air miles Victoria Beckham clocks up. Not only is the topic deemed worthy of column inches, but her carbon footprint has been reported to two decimal places. Now that's what I call progress.
The concept of one's carbon footprint is now acquiring common currency. Importantly, there is the recognition that individuals and organisations have a tangible impact that applies to virtually any transaction, or to any object that we use.
What is beginning to make a difference is the fact that carbon footprints can be measured. This seems to be sparking curiosity: questions sent to me asking for more information about carbon footprints have become commonplace.
Supermarkets are starting to emphasise localisation in the supply chain; they are looking for a marketing edge by labelling products with carbon footprint data.
This is all useful. However, carbon footprinting will only become really meaningful when it starts to influence the biggest lever – price – as a matter of necessity. Until now, carbon emissions have been a classic example of an externality, a cost that is not reflected in today's prices, but is left for anyone except the direct consumer to cope with.
The change that we are beginning to face is the need to fully internalise the cost of emissions. Many companies are facing reduction targets as part of emissions trading; sooner or later we can expect carbon taxation and other associated costs to be factored in. Inevitably, we will see the need for comparability, audit trails, standard approaches – you know the score.
The Beckhams can deal with the cost of counting carbon, but switched-on companies need to do some serious thinking.
What is the scale of cost that we might face? What opportunities are there for re-engineering processes and products, doing things more smartly and exploiting markets that reward those who are carbon-savvy? It seems that we are only just beginning to find out
