[sustran] WBCSD report - general commentary

[eric.britton at ecoplan.org]

Wednesday, July 21, 2004, Paris, France, Europe

Dear Colleagues, 

The following note just in from Professor Peter Newman, a leading figure
on the international sustainability scene and currently Chair of the
Western Australian Sustainability Roundtable and Sustainability
Commissioner in New South Wales (Australia)

 "Eric.  I think the report is very disappointing as they do not follow
their own rhetoric on eco-efficiency. I am a strong supporter of WBCSD
on many things which it is pioneering but they are going nowhere on
mobility. 

"It seems that mobility is the last sacred cow of modernism. We can
apparently now decouple wealth from energy, from greenhouse, from waste
but not from mobility. In our cities the wealthy are choosing to live
where they can travel less and the poor are the mobile ones. Its not
such a sacred cow if we push hard enough to show that there are real
sustainability gains if we set stretch targets for reduced mobility.
Peter Newman"

To my mind this gives us a great starting place on what I regard as the
strategic bottom line issues here - i.e., what are we trying to
accomplish with all this anyway.  Let me share my thoughts with you on
this briefly:

1.      Like Peter I am a long time supporter of the WBCSD, glad that
they are there and trying to do the tough job of doing something about
the Great Sustainability Divide between the present-oriented economic
interests of international business (think of it as" the old"), and
their longer term responsibility to the planet and to the people who
live on it (vs. "the new"). And indeed, there does seem to be an as yet
unbridged problem when it is time for them to pick up their
sustainability cudgels and apply them to the transport/mobility sector.
Which of course is why we are all here today.  TO help them with this.

2.      It is my view on this that, thus far at least, the price of real
responsible behaviour is not only so new and so very different, but it
is so high in terms of both their institutional mindset and $$$ that
they will, as long as they can, continue to revert to this kind of
rather old fashioned pre-narrowing and scenarios ploy when it comes to
'facing the facts of sustainability and mobility'. My own quick back of
the envelope calculation suggests that current arrangements are bringing
in some ten(s) of billions of dollars into their coffers each day that
nothing significant changes.  (Under these circumstances, I rather think
I myself would tend to hesitate a bit before inviting fundamental
underlying change - which of course is what sustainable development is
all about in this context.)  Oops.

3.      The twelve companies that commissioned this work are not in fact
sworn or explicit enemies of sustainable development and social justice,
that would be all too simple and turn this into the latest run of
"Dallas".  It is just that they are basically still in a state of
denial.  Their report makes this clear of course - but at the same time
they have to be asking themselves: "How could we have done better.  We
have addressed the issues, we have spent a lot of money and time in
doing it, we have talked to a lot of people about it, we have produced a
huge and beautiful report, and we have made our seven goal
recommendations.  What more could they ask for?"  (Yes, but as we all
know it is often for us middle class folks a lot easier to spend money
than it is to go painfully back to square one and reassess every tough
strand in a situation that is of great importance to us and that may
require significant and possibly painful adjustments on our part (for
example our relationship  or lack thereof with our children, where it is
all too often a lot easier to spend money for psychiatrics and ballet
lessons than get off our butts and spend lots of time with them
ourselves.)  

4.      And our job, as I see it here, is to help them as kindly and
positively as we can to lead them out of this state of denial and back
to work in addressing the real and full panoply of issues and options
that together constitute sustainable mobility.  And in getting them off
on a new path in their own thinking, not only in this respect but in
fact more strategically for their businesses as a whole.

5.      With this 100% collegial if unrequested International Peer
Review that is now getting underway, I am confident that all of those of
us who are groped here have the information, the means, the wisdom and
the human skills needed to help them in this. Moreover, in addition to
the light that we can now help them with on the underlying issues of
what mobility and the basic mobility trade-offs and options are all
about, we can also and in parallel have a look at least two things which
are in fact very much part of this broader problematique:

a.      $50 oil as an "ugly" current reality (and not some maybe out in
some indefinite future), and 
b.      Massive world overcapacity a-building in the auto sector. 

6.      The importance of this last in our context is very great --
since the impact is that we can be quite certain that there is going to
be a lot of big time losing going on in the sector in the future,
including in the very near future. And it's my guess that any company or
group that gets control of the real issues and gets ready to confront
them without waiting to be pushed, is going to have a jump of the rest.
And that jump can make the difference between survival and oops. 

7.      To conclude: This is not a hair pulling contest and if we are to
accomplish anything of real value it will have to be with knowledge,
firmness and compassion. We want to bring the WBCSD, the twelve
sponsors, and behind them a lot of other people and groups to the table
of what we might call for  lack of anything better the New Mobility
Agenda.  In the most positive way possible.

That at least is my current take on what is gong on here. 

Eric Britton 

















 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/manage/private/sustran-discuss/attachments/20040721/7cc07c00/attachment-0001.html