I sat next to Professor Sir Brian Hoskins at a business lunch last week. Sir Brian is widely acknowledged as a world-leading authority on climate change and global weather patterns. He was the single scientist amid a clutch of the great and good of British business gathered round the table.
One of our number trotted out the usual, dull falsehood – namely (and I paraphrase only slightly) that ‘it’s fine to look out for the environment when times are good; but right now it’s only the economy that counts’. I tried to point out the madness of this message – and to properly consider the inter-dependency of the two. Sadly, this lady was having none of it.
It is understandable that business leaders need to figure out the shape and duration of the current Recession – but it strikes me that we are just way too obsessed about when the bottom of the ‘V’ will be reached (assuming, of course, that it is indeed a ‘V’) and how we can struggle onto the upward trajectory of that same, single letter. My point is that we cannot afford to remain within the current crippling system. We need to change shape altogether.
Enter Sir Brian. ‘Let us be really clear’, he said. ‘A return to the same business model – on the same V – is the doomsday scenario. There can be no such thing as Business as Usual anymore’.
I asked him if I could quote him on that and he replied ‘with pleasure’. Whatever Nigel Lawson (Economist, Journalist, Politician) may ask us to believe, the science does not lie.
