WEF Warms to Climate

25 Jan 2008 – John Elkington

Part-way through a private reception hosted by Al Gore yesterday evening, John Doerr – who leads the cleantech charge at venture capital fund Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers – lent across to me and asked for the exact wording of what U2 singer Bono had just called Gore in his response to the former Vice-President’s impassioned speech a few minutes earlier on climate change. “Scientist and pastor,” I replied.

Doerr then referred to Bono, who at the time was embracing Mary Robinson, former Irish PM, as a “poet and pastor”. Certainly both Gore and Bono are missionaries, one for action on climate and the other for solutions to hunger and poverty. But for me one of the most interesting features of this year’s Davos has been the way these two great agendas are increasingly seen as intertwined; twin strands of a political version of the double helix.

Clearly, in talking about individuals as well as ideas, I am opening myself up to the twin charge of (1) name-dropping and (2) breaking the confidentiality of the confessional. Despite the risk, allow me to continue the experiment, since ideas are so often intertwined with those who conceived and/or advocate them.

So, when I bumped into Financial Times economics editor Martin Wolf during the day, he noted that last year, most of the sessions seemed to be on climate, whereas this year he was mainly being called upon to address the financial meltdown. Given that he has been an effective contrarian on such issues, albeit by far the most reasoned and fair in my experience, I commented that it was probably a case of starting with the shock troops and then sending in the regulars. But my experience in recent days has been very different.

Climate change is shot through much of the agenda this year. Environment is also on a roll, with the number of sessions on environmental themes up 70% on 2007. Yesterday alone I moderated a 150-minute session with CEOs from the consumer sector on the sustainability agenda (with climate in pole position) and a dinner on the effectiveness of carbon trading.

Earlier on I had sat in on a session featuring Google and Google.org founders Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Larry Brilliant. The session was moderated by New York Times columnist Tom Friedman. And one of the more extraordinary features of the event was the attack mounted on ExxonMobil, seen in many ways as akin to the tobacco industry CEOs who decades ago held up their hands to swear that there was nothing wrong with their product.

What made the Google challenge so interesting is that this group of entrepreneurs is increasingly investing in sustainable energy projects. And, again, Gore and Doerr were there in the front row, living symbols of the accelerating cleantech revolution.

Then, today, I was a discussion leader in a session of ‘Unsustainable Trends’ – and one of the participants suggested that we think through how we would invest 1 million EUR and 1 billion EUR in efforts to counter unsustainability. My answers were that I would invest the 1 million EUR in an X-Prize Foundation prize encouraging innovators and entrepreneurs to tackle relevant problems. The 1 billion EUR, I continued, I would invest in J. Craig Venter’s work on synthetic biology and sustainable energy. (One of the benefits of the cheek-by-jowl environment here was that I had been able to thank Dr. Venter for his book ‘A Life Decoded,’ which I am half way through and am finding wonderfully provocative and stimulating.)

Then, after an Infosys reception this evening, we took part in a session on taboos. Among those on our table was a former child soldier. We talked about many different forms of taboo, good and bad, living and fossilized. And it struck me that one of the great taboos here in Davos is the notion that instead of climate change being an engine of future growth, as the Doerrs and Gores of this world so energetically and persuasively argue, it might hit us so hard that substantial reductions in energy consumption would be forced upon us.

That, it seems, is still the potential future that dares not speak its name. And one reason for that is the perfectly understandable fear that effective action to curb global warming would divert effort and resources from poverty alleviation. But the other side of the coin, as Bono and others in the ‘Make Poverty History’ movement increasingly recognize, is that climate change – through extreme weather, droughts, the spread of disease, sea level rises and forced migrations – will hit the poor hardest, at least in the early phases of the process.

Still, even if people like Craig Venter may not yet know the recipe for whipping together the genetic codes of Bono and Gore, for me, their work offers the single greatest source of inspiration and hope in a political landscape agreed by most people to be almost devoid of the sort of leadership that is needed to take our species through what looks set to be our defining century.