Is the perfect storm gathering? Though it hogs the headlines, global warming is not mankind's only apocalyptic threat. Global warming represents but one face of a many-headed Hydra that's menacing Mother Earth.
For even if you set global warming aside, the strains of a proliferating population coupled with alarming depletion rates in the planet's irreplaceable resources prove equally frightening. In the opinion of a swelling battalion of scientists, whether the issue is global warming, overpopulation, or depletion of resources, society will need to adapt to mammoth changes in the near future. So is it time for business to change its traditional set of metrics?
As the World Turns
The American business community views the world's "health" through the prism of economic health. In business circles, economic health is implicitly (and often explicitly) acknowledged as the engine that drives the vitality and efficacy of American society. The business sector holds sacrosanct such economic indicators as the Dow Jones index, the prime interest rate, the number of housing starts, and the unemployment rate. These metrics are designed to read the pulse, temperature, standing heart rate, etc. of the body economic. They constitute a palette of primary colors that, when mixed in the proper proportions portray any appropriate hue of the country's economic health.
Drilling down beyond the economic indicators, each industry, each company, each department itself develops its own peculiar set of key indicators to supplement, refine or extend the economic indicators. Throughout industry, this body of data is scrutinized incessantly to guide and substantiate decisions large and small. Keeping up with such a voluminous databank is a full-time, all-consuming challenge (as though I have to tell you any of this!).
But let's bet back to global warming. The question global warming poses to the business community is: Does our preoccupation with business stats demand our focus so fully that we're oblivious to the sea changes taking place in the world around us? I'll be first to admit: P & L's, key indicators, goal tracking, project management, balance sheets, business plans and the like monopolize the typical manager's day. Meanwhile as Al Gore and a growing corps of scientists caution, the world keeps turning and the sun keeps rising. But the sun is not rising, they contend, on the same planet it illuminated a scant few centuries ago.
Al Gore's admonition to business is twofold: conducting "business as usual" is now life-threatening and the global business community must address global warming as a matter of survival.
The American business community has not uniformly embraced Al Gore's dire scientific prophecies. Far from it. Via his Academy Award winning film, "An Inconvenient Truth," the former US Vice President has branded global warming into the American consciousness (a consciousness that alas seems more energized by Paris Hilton's latest non-exploits). Nonetheless, the ex-VP's detractors belittle global warming as yet another passing fancy of a capricious public that prefers novelty to substance. They scoff that global warming is merely a global menace du jour destined to be replaced by another new kid on the block after its 15-minute run of fame.
Nor has the Bush Administration's reaction to global warming helped float the global-warming boat. The Administration is a naysayer, insisting that global warming is a yet-unproven theory. Until it is proven, Bushies assert, they see no reason to deviate from business as usual. They contend that Gore's science is detecting a new natural weather cycle one that is neither induced nor influenced by man and his combustion activities. They maintain that global climate change cannot be warded off, slowed or deterred and therefore merits no action on mankind's part.
Selling the Message
Therein lies the rub. Gore's position is supported by an overwhelming preponderance of scientists across the globe yet his assertion that global warming is man-made defies definitive proof. Yet at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in February 2007, the world's leading climate scientists reported that global warming has indeed begun, that it is very likely caused by man, and that it will be unstoppable for centuries. Their report sets at 90% the probability that global warming is caused by man's burning of fossil fuels.
Another august body supporting man-made global warming is the national science academies of the G8+5 nations. In preparation for the 2007 G8 Summit, this body reaffirmed its 2005 statement: "It is unequivocal that the climate is changing, and it is very likely that this is predominantly caused by the increasing human interference with the atmosphere. These changes will transform the environmental conditions on Earth unless counter-measures are taken."
Despite those supporters from the scientific community, America's global-warming fervor, in many respects, has mired into an assertion-rebuttal loop that rolls like this: (assertion) "Global warming is the greatest threat facing our planet" (rebuttal) "It is not" (assertion) "It is too" (rebuttal) "Is not" (assertion) "Is too" ...
Perhaps Gore and the global-warming crowd should take a page from the book of best business practices: Enlist partners that can muster the additional clout necessary to energize a new market. So far, the global-warming crowd has been selling their "product" on hunch. That's their weakness. The data Gore presents does not or cannot irrefutably pin current human suffering or economic loss on global warming caused by human activity. There is no smoking gun. In fact, the refutation that mankind has nothing to do with climate change dovetails perfectly with a well known saying of Benjamin Franklin, our country's most revered scientist, who observed: "Everyone talks about the weather but no one does anything about it." Al Gore's message flies in the face of that submissive truism. Suffice it to say, to win hearts and minds, Gore would be in a better position with Franklin's sagacity in his corner.
Since man-made global warming has proven such a hard sell, Al Gore's message could benefit from the synergies of additional "business partners." How about the Earth Policy Institute (EPI), which was founded and headed by Dr. Lester Browne. The Earth Policy Institute dedicates itself to planning a sustainable future for the planet. Sounds like a compatible mission statement. Dr. Browne and his team devote their days to crunching data on issues that are concrete and immediate - issues less esoteric and theoretical than global warming. In their studies, they tap data sources from around the globe to probe less ballyhooed trends that pose every bit as much threat as global warming. Here's a sampling of the issues EPI addresses: the inability of the planet's water supply to sate mankind's proliferating needs, the alarming worldwide loss of topsoil due to over-farming and farming on marginal lands, the galloping pace of planetary desertification, the disastrous drop in grains and grain reserves; the shortfall between grain supplies and what is needed to feed the world's escalating population; and the rapidly depleting reserves for such non-glitzy raw materials as lead (18 years), tin (20 years), copper (25 years), iron ore (64), and bauxite (69 years).
Notice the difference between those types of issues and global warming. In most cases, the Earth Policy's findings are, if not indisputable, at least measurable. In toto, the variety of topics they explore synthesizes a "big picture" that we as business people fail to see because we're all busy crunching the economic/ business metrics within our own little domains. In contrast with theoretical global-warming assertions, there can be no gainsaying that mankind is causing the crises the Earth Policy Institute brings to the fore. For instance, to substantiate the kinds of water deficits that China faces and will face henceforth, EPI cites that the mighty Yellow River in China (the seventh longest river in the world) has failed to reach the Bohai Sea in 18 of the past 26 years. Why? Because so much of its flow has been diverted for irrigation - a pragmatic short-sighted practice with disastrous long-term implications and consequences.
A cursory spin around the globe shows that water shortages are queued up to cause a global crisis. In China, because of excessive water demands, Hebei Province has lost 969 of its 1,052 lakes. In the Mideast, the Dead Sea has dropped by 82 feet in the past 40 years, while on American shores, Mono Lake in California has fallen by 11 meters since 1941. Africa's Lake Chad, once spanned 23,000 square kilometers in parts of Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, and Chad. It now covers a mere 900 square kilometers and is situated entirely within Chad's borders. Concurrently aquifers the world over are being pumped down to dangerously low levels due to increasing human population, which causes a concomitant rise in water requirements for both irrigation and livestock.
In essence the Earth Policy Institute has assumed a role as an apolitical clearinghouse to help sort out the dizzying volume of data that describes the health of our planet. RPI analyzes world health in much the same way that we in the business world employ economic/ business metrics to describe economic health.
As for global warming and its advocates, the prospects for success; i.e., gaining universal acceptance of its message, would improve enormously by partnering their theoretical forecasts with real-time data-driven crises that are mounting because of overexploitation of resources and overpopulation. These three issues (and a few others) are inextricably entangled; i.e., more people necessitate more power consumption, which causes more global warming and necessitates more resources which causes more depletion, etc.
The question is: What role will business play in righting the planet's threatened equilibrium on all these fronts? Is it time to incorporate prominent environmental, population, and depletion factors into our standard economic metrics? More importantly, should business metrics espouse that a habitable and healthy planet is everyone's core business?
Robert Gordon is a writer and business consultant based in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. He has authored several books and his magazine columns appear in numerous publications regionally and nationally on topics ranging from business and politics to humour and sports. A former energy-company executive, he is a registered professional engineer. He currently coaches executives and consults with corporations on communications improvement and strategy, corporate development, and strategic planning. He is fluent in both English and French and can be contacted for consulting and speaking engagements at rgordon33_5@hotmail.com.
© Capital ME 2007
