4 Dec 2008
Tomorrow’s Green Economy
Last night I went to an event put on by Tomorrow’s Company at the East India Club in St James’ Square, a Victorian palazzo built as a club for officers of the East India Company in 1849.
The do was held in the Smoking Room, but of course there was no smoke and no East India Company officers for that matter, so Tomorrow was under discussion surrounded by a host of yesterdays.
The incongruousness of the venue’s history (and dress code - ties please - for that matter) was nicely referenced in an opening address by Tony Manwaring of T’s Co.
The first speaker was Bill Becker, the Exec Director of Obama’s eco planning team (PCAP - Presidential Climate Action Project). Bill gave us a crisp and compelling whistle-stop tour of the arguments for immediate and long-term investment in the Green Economy. On this occasion, there was a strong sense that he was preaching to the converted, but I still found it fascinating and quite impressive to experience ‘close-up’ a member of the Democrat central team which will finally get to implement their policies next year.
Also, I hadn’t properly understood before just how central ecologically driven planning is to Obama’s policy platform.
The second speaker, equally on top of his game, and another high-level operator well used to the international conference scene, was Pavan Sukhdev, research leader of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Green Economy Initiative (as well as, by way of diversity, holding down a job as Head of Deutsche Bank’s Global Markets business in India), who had an immensely engaging and persuasive way of making the case for a wholesale re-engineering of the world’s view of economics, using concepts like ’Natural Capital’.
Under the gaze of a battledress-suited Sir Winston, Pavan welcomed Obama’s USA into the eco-fold, reminding the room that, in Churchill’s words, “Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing… after they have exhausted all other possibilities.“ To remove any chance of smugness among non-Americans present, we were reminded that the UK’s usage of renewable energy is still less than 2% (well behind most of the rest of Europe).
All in all a great event; sadly I couldn’t stay for the music, food, drink and general festivities which looked set to run on for some time. And on a more serious note, it is enormously reassuring that such able people as Bill and Pavan are devoting themselves to all of our future.
