We’re on the way…..

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Posted 09 September 2010

My last blog entry ended with a question “Where do we find a compelling vision for a low carbon future?” ..... implying that without one, progress to a stable climate will be slow.

Having done a bit of digging I have some ideas ...... but before getting on to those, here’s a quick update on my recent holiday in Cornwall, UK which quite unexpectedly threw light on the vision thing.

En route I stopped off in Bodmin to visit Giles Pearson, my friend from Cape Town University days, who is an inventing engineer.  He has spent the last 15 years developing better wind turbines.  I asked him if he had a vision for a low carbon future.  He said he was struggling to see beyond our addiction to cheap fossil fuels, and we should use those up as fast as possible to force a transition to low-carbon alternatives. 

To console ourselves after that rather bleak analysis, we set off on winding roads flanked by hedge-rows and tumbling fields of green to Porthcurno just up from the south-west tip of England.  What an astounding place - a perfect pirate’s cove with a snug sandy beach in a sheltered bay of glistening Cornish-blue sea, rising up steep gorse covered slopes to a cobble-stoned village - home to the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum. That was our destination.  Giles declared it one of the most compelling places of interest, and I really needed convincing.  After a couple of hours I was, and it had triggered a mild ‘Eureka’ moment on the vision question, which I’ll come back to shortly.

Before I left on vacation, it was the usual flurry of getting stuff done and things lined-up so that the restorative influence of a break from business wouldn’t wear off completely within hours of returning.  One of the hurried things I did was ask Catherine Martin (a member of our team who runs the Secretariat of the UK’s All Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group ) the question “Which individual, organisation, or enterprise has the most vivid and compelling vision of a low-carbon future?”  

Much to our surprise, none immediately sprung to mind.  So, Catherine agreed to work on it.

We found that there seem to be few low-carbon future scenarios that are both comprehensive and vivid. Many businesses, NGOs, and think tanks have put forward technical roadmaps, along the lines of the UK Centre for Alternative Technology’s Zero Carbon Britain 2030 report, to meeting specific carbon reduction targets, but actual images of what it would be like to live in a low-carbon world are rare. Read more about some of the organisations that have put forward noteworthy visions.

Catherine’s research showed me some really great and inspiring stuff, but nothing could quite ignite and unleash the energy and aspirations of the ~7 billion people who inhabit the planet.

Back in Porthcurno - the combination of Giles’ comments and our ‘vision research’ was gnawing away at me as we entered the Telegraph Museum, and I didn’t expect any answers from an exhibition of Bakelite and brass morse-code equipment of a by-gone age.  But - this is what I found…..

The communication technology which has changed our world - mobiles, fibre optics, the World Wide Web, radio and television - all evolved from the development of the telegraph and early wireless technology.

The Museum tells this story; from the first use of electricity to how we communicate today.  Porthcurno was the largest cable station in the world.  It was where telegraph cables that linked Britain with its Empire and other nations came ashore. The valley was the hub of international cable communications from the 1870s to the 1970s.  When you walk across that pirate beach you step over the skeletons of cables that communicated all the major events of the late 19th and 20th centuries around the world.

It also tells the story of John Pender - who laid the first successful trans-Atlantic cable in 1866 and ended up manufacturing and laying most of the submarine telegraph cables that first connected the rest of the world.  The thirty-two companies he founded later amalgamated and merged with Marconi’s wireless enterprise to become the modern-day Cable & Wireless.  And although most of those cables are now obsolete, today 95% of international internet and telephone traffic goes through fiber-optic undersea cables.

The astounding thing about Pender’s story is that in 1858 he was one of 345 investors that put up £1,000 each for the first trans-Atlantic cable venture.  They lost everything when the cable failed after sending less than 800 messages at a word or so per hour.  He then put up a personal guarantee of £250,000 to make an improved cable 2,400 miles long, bought the largest ship in the world and laid 1,900 miles on the sea-bed to depths of up to 2 miles before losing the cable end in a storm a few hundred miles off the American coast.  He went back and started again……

The endearing thing about the Museum is that it is staffed by people who actually worked there when it was operational (Cable and Wireless finally closed operations there in the early 1990s).  Their knowledge and enthusiasm is infectious.  As I was leaving, I asked the gentleman who had presented a short history of the telegraph to visitors “What vision drove people like Pender to do the almost impossible?”

His answer was illuminating and delivered what I had been looking for.  He thought Pender was driven not by a vision but by a belief that people have a natural inclination to communicate, and that if he could deliver that he’d be rewarded.  Pender’s belief triggered developments that took us from one word an hour to millions per second in 150 years.

William McDonough stated recently “Being less bad is a great thing to do and has the right trajectory but it is insufficient to the task of creating a sustaining world .......  simply reducing the things we don't want, like carbon, won't achieve the results we do want, like renewable energy”. For the full article - '10 Things I've Learned from Leaders in Sustainability'.

That’s the connection to Pender’s story –by choice we want to buy and consume products and services that protect and enhance our climate.  We desire to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.  By nature we don’t want to do less bad, we’d like to do good.  We do not need a vision to fuel that instinct – we need options to participate in that future.  

Carbon offsetting allows companies to set and reach carbon emission targets that allow them to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.  That means businesses can grow their top and bottom lines while reducing emissions in real and absolute terms.  It is a mechanism that accelerates investments in low carbon technologies in parts of the world where finance is most needed and where the return on investment is greatest.  

We need to acknowledge though that carbon offsetting is at the same developmental stage as Pender’s telegraphic network was in the early 1900’s.  And it too has the potential to develop in the same extra-ordinary way as that first network which evolved to the fibre-optic superhighways of today’s internet.  

Next posting ...... Cable vs Wireless?  Carbon Trading vs Taxes?  One, the other, or both?

 

Jonathan Shopley

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