If you haven’t already seen Al Gore’s DVD An Inconvenient Truth, hire it this weekend and listen and watch it carefully. Then discuss it with your family and people at work, and ask ‘What can we do immediately to reduce our carbon footprint?’In that documentary, Al Gore demonstrated in graphic simplicity where we are already headed. The scientific data is no longer reasonably open to disagreement. The UN report on global warming delivered to the world on 2 February 2007 put dissent to rest – we must reign in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 if humanity wants to avoid catastrophic climate change.Al Gore’s slide show contained one particular segment that was inescapable. That was where he juxtaposed global temperature fluctuations over hundreds of thousands of years with CO2 levels for the same period. The temperatures rose and fell in a precise correspondence with CO2 levels. The CO2 and temperature fluctuations meant the difference between a nice sunny day, and a mile of ice over our heads during an ice age.  They were the natural cycles over a very long period of time.Enter the modern age, and the CO2 levels are already double their long term maximum levels, and it has happened within the past hundred years – a fraction of a second in Earth’s life time. The escalation of CO2 in the atmosphere over the next 40 or so years is predicted to be perhaps that much again  – for many of us currently in business, in our great grandchildren’s lifetime – unless we take immediate and decisive action now. That’s around triple the maximum over the past few hundreds of thousands of years. If the normal 300,000 years of fluctuations are equivalent to sunny days versus ice age, imagine what our living environment would be like were the CO2 levels to reach three times their historical maximum levels!You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see and feel what’s happening.

You don’t have to look too far to see who is responsible. 

You don’t have to go too far to recognise who has to do something about it.

I just go and look in a mirror.

Over January, whilst idly contemplating various things that were of interest, I logged on to the Ergon energy web site and did a quick calculation of how much greenhouse gas was produced in supporting my household.

 The calculator represented household energy usage, airline travel and motor vehicle travel.

 I was shocked.

20 tonnes a year just from those sources! That excluded indirect emissions such as from the manufacturing process to build my car or TV, and excludes international air travel, which I didn’t include. The air travel emissions (my share of the aviation fuel) were calculated in economy seating. On international trips I fly business class, which uses around 2 – 3 times the space of an economy seat, and 2 – 3 times the share of greenhouse emissions.

It took only a few minutes to figure out that I could very simply reduce my family’s share of greenhouse emissions by switching from coal generated electricity to green electricity produced by solar and wind power.  The cost? Around $400 p.a. extra, and we’d be producing zero emissions from our use of electricity. (Have a look at www.ergon.com.au).

 That will reduce around 7 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions  a year.

When I travel from Sydney to Melbourne for a few days conducting workshops, I usually fly. That delivers 2.5 – 3 times times as much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere than if I drove there and back.  I love driving long distances. I work the phone in the car, think of new strategies and products, plan our next project, relax with some nice music, and overall it only takes me perhaps  5 – 6 hours longer than if I drove to the airport, checked in, flew to Melbourne, collected my luggage and took a cab or hire car to my destination. On the trip by plane I’d have been lucky to get half an hour of quality time to think and plan.

I won’t scrap domestic flights, as that would be unrealistic in our business, but I’ll certainly consider how I can utilise the time in the car and take the better environmental alternative as part of our corporate (and my personal) responsibility.

I’m sure that we are not alone. Most companies could substitute readily available web conferencing for travel on numerous occasions.

Since January I’ve also started riding my bicycle to our business Post Office early in the morning, instead of driving the 6km return journey. That saves a few kgs of greenhouse gas a year and, I’ve lost 5 kgs of flab. Sometimes I even scoot the long way back home and, thinking like a 12 year old, fly down a long, winding hill around by the bay with the wind in my hair follicles and a few tufts of hair flapping. Its an extra 2 km to do that and it feels good.

Edwina and I sat down and looked at how we could reduce emissions in our business.

The obvious solution was to turn off the lights, computers, printers and other equipment when they weren’t needed, instead of leaving them on standby (which can use up to 40% of the power that they’d suck out of the electricity grid when under normal use).

Then we became more creative and looked at this whole issue of air travel. The idea of web seminars popped up and when we investigated it further, webinars were looking like a very good solution for delivering several of our programs with very little impact on the environment. We also figured that we could deliver the web seminars at a  lower cost to the clients than live workshops and we could also capitalise on our international base and leverage the webinars globally with a lot less effort than our original plan.

So, in the next couple of months we will be delivering webinars globally from our office to yours at a significant discount on the usual $1000 a seat price, which of course makes the  workshop more accessible to all levels of clients’ organisations without them having to leave the office.

The message that I’m trying to deliver here is this: We can all take a few simple steps to do what MUST be done to improve our environment. We can take those steps personally and in business. If you get your team at work to put their heads together for an hour, you will find ways to save money and greenhouse emissions, and even innovative ways to improve your product or service delivery. When you do, tell your clients. You’ll be surprised how many people are now willing to support responsible business.

The other benefit was encapsulated in a comment by Sir Richard Branson  recently. Remember him – he’s build 6 distinctive businesses in the past 40 years, each one worth over $1 billion, so he knows something that most of us would like to know. This is what he said:

“Business should certainly become more responsible and life should not simply be about the bottom line. If you are one of 50,000 people working for a company that is doing good work in Africa, building schools and hospitals, you are likely to work harder for it because it’s not just a money-making machine. I’ve never seen Virgin as a money-making machine. I’ve seen it as a means to change things.”

Over the past 25 years I have included an ‘impact in the community’ element to all of the Cultural Change projects on which I’ve consulted organisations. On average, around 20% of employees in those companies are driven by a desire to make a positive difference in their world. By harnessing that energy, clients have been able to raise morale, productivity, energy and commitment to the benefit of the company and the community. I’ll be writing more about that, and how you can do it for your organisation, in the next few articles under the topic of Cultural Change and Transformation.

I’ll also showcase what some of Spandah’s clients have done to innovate and impact positively on the environment. If you have some stories of your own business’s initiatives (or your personal actions) that we can showcase, please comment.

Here is a list of the things that Al Gore suggests we can all do with little effort:

• reduce your carbon emissions to zero
• buy energy efficient appliances and light bulbs
• change your thermostat and use clock thermostat to reduce energy for heating and cooling
• weatherproof your house
• recycle
• if you can,  buy a hybrid car
• when you can, walk or ride a bicycle
• where you can, use light rail and mass transit
• tell your parents not the ruin the world you will live in
• if you’re a parent, join with their children to preserve the world we live in
• switch to renewable sources of energy
• call your power company to see if they offer green energy
• if they don’t, ask them why not
• vote for leaders who pledge to solve this crisis
• write to your political representative
• plant trees – lots of trees
• speak up in your community
• call radio shows and write to newspapers
• insist that all countries freeze CO2 emissions
• join international efforts to stop global warming
• reduce our dependence on foreign oils
• help farmers grow alcohol fuel
• raise fuel economy standards
• insist on lower emissions from automobiles
• if you believe in prayer,  pray people will find the strength to change
• in the words of the old African proverb: When you pray, move your feet
• encourage everyone you know to see this movie
• learn as much as you can about the climate crisis

Then put your knowledge into action.