CHAPTER 8

LEADING ON THE CLIMATE CRISIS

In November 2020, a group of 38 investors, responsible for more than $9 trillion in assets, wrote a letter to over 30 of Europe’s largest companies telling them that their corporate accounts needed to carry an explanation of what they were doing to save the planet. The letter’s signatories, who included JP Morgan Asset Management, Fidelity International and M&G Investments, told the companies, Anglo American, BMW and Lufthansa, among others: ‘The accounts are key to how capital is deployed by management as well as investors. If the accounts leave out material climate risks, too much capital will go towards activities that put shareholder capital at risk. Worse still, this puts all our futures at risk.’1

What were these asset managers saying? That companies that ignored climate change not only threatened all our futures; they also put shareholders in a perilous position. Governments are pushing companies to meet their obligations under the Paris Agreement, whose goal is to limit global warming to below 2 degrees, and preferably 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared with pre-industrial levels.2 Apart from their concerns as citizens, parents or grandparents, these investors were worried that companies that engaged in climate damaging business, such as coal or oil, would find their investments depreciating in value and damaging shareholders.

Business was heavily represented at the Glasgow COP26 climate change summit in 2021, with its aim to ‘keep 1.5C alive’. ‘I’ve seen more CEOs here in the last eight days, than I have at the previous eight years of COPs,’ Jules Kortenhorst, chief executive of RMI, a Colorado-based think-tank, said in Glasgow. The FT reported that business groups joined climate activists in their disappointment that COP26 had not achieved more, particularly after a commitment to end coal use was watered down.3

In Chapter 7, we talked about whether being a socially responsible business clashed with shareholders’ need for solid investment returns. We saw how difficult it sometimes was to reconcile the two. But when it comes to climate change, many investors and business leaders believe this conflict has disappeared. Unless companies reassess their climate-changing activities, they and their shareholders will be left with investments which, because society and the law no longer tolerates their continuation, will become ‘stranded assets’.

Huw van Steenis, then chair of UBS’s sustainable finance committee, told an FT Forums meeting that the bank was increasingly taking climate risk into account. ‘First of all, we will think about the loan book and what we’re financing.’ UBS had significantly reduced its loan exposure to the oil and gas industry, he said.

Throughout the oil, gas and mining industries, companies are feeling the pressure from investors. Bernard Looney, BP’s chief executive, has pledged the company will cut the amount of carbon in the products it sells by half and that it will become a net-zero company – in other words, that it will produce no net carbon dioxide from its own operations – by 2050 or sooner. As the FT said in an editorial comment on BP’s announcement: ‘For a company that traces its roots to the first oilfields in Iran more than a century ago, this is a radical departure. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company — later British Petroleum — was synonymous with the development of the modern oil industry.’4

The US oil major ExxonMobil had been one of the most recalcitrant companies when it came to action on climate change, and a target for campaigners. Darren Woods, its CEO, insisted he would not commit the company to a net-zero target, saying ‘the solutions aren’t available to us today’.5 But, in May 2021, shareholders acted. They forced changes to ExxonMobil’s board, voting to add at least two directors nominated by Engine No 1, a hedge fund that said that the company’s continued focus on fossil fuels was putting it at ‘existential risk’.6 In the end, Engine No 1 won three seats on the Exxon board.7 In January 2022, ExxonMobil finally committed itself to net zero from its own oil and gas operations by 2050.8

On the same day as the election of the ExxonMobil directors, shareholders at Chevron voted – against the wishes of the company’s management – to set targets for reducing pollution from Chevron’s products. In September 2021, the company responded by saying it would spend $10 billion over seven years to increase its renewable products and cut its carbon pollution. Not enough, said Andrew Logan, senior director of oil and gas at Ceres, which coordinates investor action on climate change. He said the Chevron announcement ‘looks like a step forward, but a relatively modest step when what is needed is a giant leap’.9

After pressure from Climate Action 100+, which is supported by hundreds of large investors, Ivan Glasenberg, then-chief executive of Glencore, one of the world’s biggest coal producers, announced in 2019 that the company would cap its coal output at that year’s level. Glencore said: ‘We recognise climate change science as set out by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.’ Glencore added: ‘To deliver a strong investment case to our shareholders, we must invest in assets that will be resilient to regulatory, physical and operational risks related to climate change.’10

It is not just shareholders who are forcing companies to confront climate change. Judges are too. In 2021, a Dutch court ordered Shell to cut its net carbon emissions by 45 per cent by 2030, compared to their 2019 level. Shell had said that, while it was investing in electric vehicle charging, hydrogen, biofuels and renewables, when it came to carbon reduction, it could only move ‘in step with society’. Judge Larisa Alwin of the district court in The Hague, told the company to go further, even if that damaged Shell’s view of its financial prospects. ‘The interest served with the reduction obligation outweighs the Shell group’s commercial interests,’ the judge said.11

There is another group pushing for change: companies’ own people, especially new recruits. ‘There’s pressure from our employees, the younger generation,’ Emmanuel Faber, who was then CEO of Danone, the French food group, told an FT Forums gathering in 2020. ‘They join us because we are a purpose-led company and because we work on climate and agriculture and inclusiveness. We see it as a magnet for talent. People are more and more impatient. If they don’t get what they were expecting to get from the company, they leave.’

This pressure from all quarters has put leaders under a harsh spotlight. But there is more to adjusting to climate change than appeasing shareholders, the courts or companies’ own staff. It presents leaders with an opportunity to rethink their entire business.

SMART CARBON REDUCTION

ExxonMobil is not the only US company that campaigners love to target. For many years, they have taken aim at Walmart over a range of issues, from healthcare for its US workers to the state of its suppliers’ factories abroad.12 But despite its bogeyman status, Walmart has been talking about environmental issues for years. It has had a particular fondness for the cost savings available from reducing its carbon footprint.

As long ago as 2005, Lee Scott, who was then Walmart’s chief executive, said: ‘There is a simple rule about the environment. If there is waste or pollution, someone along the line pays for it. For example, if our trucks are inefficient from a fuel standpoint, we’ll pay for that at the diesel pump. If the dumpsters behind our store fill up with trash, you can be assured that we paid someone to send that trash to us, and we will pay someone to take it away.’

There were all kinds of ways, Walmart discovered, in which being greener meant it could operate more cheaply. I reported in the FT in 2008 on the tricks Walmart had found to cut costs while reducing its carbon footprint: By asking a toy supplier to cut down on its packaging, Walmart could not only sell a greener product; it could cut the cost of selling it. Less packaging meant it could use fewer freight containers to transport the toys. It fitted wind skirts on its truck trailers, which reduced air resistance. This cut the amount of fuel needed. It cut fuel use further by replacing twin wheels with single ones.13

Emmanuel Faber knows today’s Walmart’s environmental efforts well. Walmart, he said, was Danone’s biggest customer. Walmart has set itself a target of zero emissions across its global operations by 2040. What is the difference between zero and net zero? Net zero is achieved with measures such as carbon offsets – tree planting or investing in renewable energy projects, for example. (We will discuss net zero in more detail below.) But plain zero, which is what Walmart says it is aiming for, is zero carbon emissions without offsets.

As Walmart explained in its climate change report after making its zero-emissions commitment, this meant going beyond its own stores and trucks and looking at what its suppliers were up to. ‘Because most emissions in the retail sector lie in product supply chains rather than in stores and distribution centres, we’re also working with suppliers . . . to avoid a gigaton of greenhouse gas emissions from the global value chain by 2030. That’s the equivalent of taking over 200 million passenger vehicles off US roads for a year,’ Walmart said.14

Emmanuel Faber told the FT Forums meeting that when Walmart CEO Doug McMillon made the zero emissions announcement, ‘I just texted him “Big congratulations and a big thank you”.’ The reason he did that, he said, was that Danone and Walmart were together involved in the entire cycle of food production, distribution and sale. When a large retailer made a zero-emissions commitment, its suppliers were roped in, as Walmart intended, and the supplier had to make its own parallel commitment. ‘So, suddenly, the largest client of Danone says, “I’m going to tick the box, I’m going to be a zero emissions company” – in a way Doug is ticking one of my boxes.’

Just as Unilever has a history of involvement with wider social issues, as we outlined in the last chapter, so Danone has long been an environmentally focused company. For Emmanuel Faber, this went far beyond corporate social responsibility. In fact, he told the FT Forums meeting, ‘When I became vice chairman of the company in 2008, I decided to close the CSR department at Danone to make sure that everyone would be responsible for it.’ ­Sustainability, he said, ‘needs to be part of the business model, not part of CSR’.

In 2020, Danone became an enterprise à mission, a purpose-driven company. Faber said the change was an indication that environment and other social issues were more than just talk for Danone.

He said, in 2020, that Danone would spend about €1 billion replacing plastic packaging made from fossil fuels with paper, glass or recycled plastic. By 2025, its water bottles would all be made from recycled plastic. It would upgrade the energy efficiency of its factories and encourage the dairy farmers that supplied to Danone to reduce their emissions.15

What is striking about Walmart and Danone’s plans is how they look beyond the usually talked about sources of pollution, such as factories and trucks, and go all the way back to the farm. ‘Agriculture emits about the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as the whole of industry,’ Faber told the FT Forums meeting. ‘Not many people know that, but that’s a fact.’

Addressing each step in the process, from farm to retail sale, reducing the emissions along the way, doesn’t just help to cut both costs and ­pollution; it is also an attempt to secure a future for the companies involved. As the Paris Agreement and COP26 put pressure on companies to cut their emissions, leaders need to start thinking how they are going to do it. As plastic is increasingly seen as a land and sea pollutant, as well as requiring fossil fuels to manufacture it, companies that use plastic need to start looking for alternatives. Companies that use other materials and processes need to start examining their contribution to climate change too, and how to mitigate it. No organisation is exempt. Even those who provide an online service are changing the climate. Digital technologies account for 3.7 per cent of global emissions, nearly as much as air travel.16

As companies examine and change each stage of their process, they understand far better how their supply chains and outputs work. They learn to adjust them not only to reduce their climate impact, but to meet other big changes, including those they have not yet learned about. ‘It wasn’t just about the planet, it was about the resilience of our business,’ Faber told the FT Forums meeting.

In July 2020, when the world was absorbing the shock of Covid-19 and the associated disruption and shutdowns, FT columnist Gillian Tett pointed to an interesting phenomenon. The share prices of ESG-focused companies seemed to be performing better than those of their competitors. One reason for this, Tett suggested, was that these socially and environmentally alert companies seemed to be managing their supply chains more effectively. ‘To get high ESG ratings, companies usually need to audit their supply chains, employee practices and internal logistics, changing them where necessary,’ she wrote.17

‘The pandemic has clearly shaped the way many of us think about an externality, an exogenous shock which is beyond our control,’ Huw van Steenis told the FT Forums meeting.

As Emmanuel Faber said, the work these companies had put into understanding, rejigging and fine-tuning their processes made them readier to react to an external shock such as Covid-19. It had made them more resilient.

THE MURKY WORLD OF CARBON OFFSETS

There was a time in my FT career when not a month would pass without me flying somewhere far from my London home: to Dubai, Hong Kong, Japan, Melbourne. I loved being wherever I was going and I didn’t even really mind the flights. But I was guiltily aware of how much carbon emission I was responsible for.

A paper published in the Global Environmental Change journal in 2020 found that, before the coronavirus crisis, a small number of frequent flyers were responsible for a large amount of the climate damage caused by commercial aircraft.18 In 2018, there were 4.4 billion air passenger journeys, which makes it sound as if over half the world’s population flew that year. They didn’t. Most of those flights were return flights, or involved stop-overs, so many of those trips were taken by the same person. And many people, like me, flew several times a year. The paper said that only 11 per cent of the world’s population took a flight in 2018 and only 4 per cent flew internationally. Frequent flyers, who made up just 1 per cent of the world’s population, were responsible for 50 per cent of aviation, related emissions.19 According to Brad Schallert of the WWF, an economy passenger flying economy from New York to San Francisco return emitted as much carbon dioxide as the average Indian did from all activities in a year.20

To mitigate this damage, many airlines offer to offset your carbon emission for you, in exchange for a small fee. I investigated carbon offsets – and discovered what a murky business it was. It is worth examining offsets more generally because, for organisations in many industries, offsets are the way they plan to reach net zero.

What are offsets? They are a promise to compensate for a carbon-­emitting activity by investing in something environment enhancing, like planting trees or providing slum dwellers with more efficient stoves. But there are problems with offsetting. These include investing in something that would have happened anyway, such as giving money to preserve a forest when there were no plans to tear it down. Offsets can also suffer ‘leakage’; one area is reforested and a neighbouring one is destroyed.21

Above all, the world of offsets is largely unregulated. As an FT article concluded: ‘Concerns over the quality and integrity of offsetting schemes have plagued them since they were first introduced more than 20 years ago. Critics say they often do not capture as much carbon as they claim. Many view offsets as providing companies with a licence to pollute and say they represent a bad use of money that would be better spent on efforts to cut emissions.’22

Yet, offsets are becoming a part of net-zero efforts that go way beyond business travellers looking to assuage their guilt. For example, the same FT article reported on a deal struck in 2021 by energy giant Royal Dutch Shell to supply PetroChina with liquefied natural gas that it branded ‘carbon neutral’. How would Shell provide carbon-neutral gas? By promising offsets. In return for the gas that would be burned to provide energy, trees would be planted in Guizhou province in southwest China.

Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of England and then UN special envoy on climate action and finance, said the world of carbon offsets ‘operates in the shadows’. Some offsets were good, but others were not.

The FT said that, apart from problems such as leakage and offsets that claimed to be heading off harm that wasn’t going to happen anyway, there was an additional problem: offsetting was meant to provide a permanent benefit, but sometimes it didn’t. For example, wildfires on the US west coast during the intensely hot summer of 2021 destroyed offset-generating trees, sending more carbon into the air.

There are NGOs that verify carbon offsets, such as Verra and Gold Standard, but there is no official regulatory authority. Mark Carney and Bill Winters, CEO of Standard Chartered, have launched a task force to turn offsets into a properly governed and enforced system, transforming it from ‘amateur to a professional level’, the FT reported. Until then, offsets remain an unreliable instrument for compensating for carbon damage.

Where does this leave leaders who want to take their organisations to net zero? In a slightly confused position. Offsets may one day be a part of the answer, but, for now, they are no replacement for reducing the organisations’ own carbon emissions. As FT columnist Pilita Clark wrote: ‘Not all offsetting is pointless, but nor is it a satisfactory substitute for the steep, unprecedented cuts in emissions needed this decade and next to meet the safest global temperature goals in the Paris climate agreement.’

The difficulty, she continued, is that reducing emissions without the aid of offsets is hard. She wrote about a manufacturing company that, having made a net-zero commitment, was hoping for a technological breakthrough to replace its fossil-fuelled furnaces with cleaner replacements.23

This demonstrates the scale of the challenge. Retailers such as Walmart can concentrate on trucking and packaging; other businesses have a harder task.

HARD-TO-CURE INDUSTRIES

In January 2020, when many in Europe and the USA were still blithely unaware of the scale of the Covid-19 crisis to come, I hosted a panel discussion at the FT on the future of flying. The audience were mostly airline or airport leaders and regular business travellers and they had a pained question: why does everyone pick on us?

Flying, they pointed out, accounts for only around 2 per cent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. That wasn’t the whole story, said Leo Murray, an environmentalist who was on the panel. When you added other damaging emissions, the true figure was 5 per cent.24 Still, the audience members said, that meant 95 per cent of emissions come from other activities, from factories to cars to office buildings to, as Emmanuel Faber said, agriculture. It seemed, my audience complained, unfair to single out flying.

In one sense, they were right. Airline travel, particularly by those who travel on business, often in business-class comfort, is an easy target. But there are two important ways in which the defenders of flying are wrong. First, before the coronavirus shutdowns, air travel was growing fast. The 4.4 billion air passenger journeys worldwide in 2018 were expected to increase to 8.2 billion, almost double, by 2037. Whether passenger numbers do reach that level will depend on how quickly travellers carry on returning to the air after the Covid-19 shutdown. The desire to travel remains strong. The moment coronavirus travel restrictions were loosened, people started flying again, particularly to go on holiday. That means that 2 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions caused by planes, or 5 per cent of all emissions, will go up. Flying’s contribution to global emissions will also increase relative to high-emitting sectors because other businesses will take remedial action. Buildings will be better insulated, companies will move towards net zero and cars will increasingly be electric.

That last is a telling point. While cars are rapidly going electric, planes are not, except in a few niche sectors. Electric air taxis are an exciting future project. In September 2021, the Brazilian low-cost airline Gol said it would launch a fleet of zero-emission air taxis ‘as cheap as an Uber’ in São Paulo – a city perfectly suited for such a development, as anyone who has endured its traffic-snarled streets and seen the large number of commuter helicopters overhead knows. Electric air taxis are still a few years off, but they will probably happen.25 As Dara Khosrowshahi, the Uber CEO, told the 2018 FT Forums meeting, people crowding into cities led to developers building upwards, putting up skyscrapers. It made no sense for city transportation not to move upwards into the air, too.

But long-haul electric planes are not likely for decades, if ever. New models of aircraft use less fuel than their predecessors, and researchers are developing sustainable alternatives to traditional aviation fuel. A letter to the FT from a team at the University of Oxford spoke of a recent development that would be an advance on existing aircraft biofuels, which compete for land with food crops. The Oxford team said that their research breakthroughs ‘enable synthetic aviation fuel to be produced directly – in a one-step process – using only CO2 extracted from air and hydrogen extracted from water using renewable electricity’.26

Airbus, one of the two big aircraft manufacturers, thinks it has found another flightpath to net zero. At a conference at its Toulouse headquarters in 2021, Guillaume Faury, its CEO, said it could start building a hydrogen-powered plane by the end of the decade so that it could enter service in 2035. Faury said developing the plane would need government and regulatory support, but that Airbus could surmount the technical obstacles.

Others are more sceptical. Boeing, Airbus’s great US rival, doesn’t expect to have a hydrogen-powered plane before 2050. David Joffe, of the UK’s Climate Change Committee, pointed out to the FT that the kerosene-driven planes being bought today would, in any case, still be flying in 2050.27

In the meantime, the aviation industry will remain in the environmentalists’ line of fire. And aviation is not the only sector that will find decarbonisation difficult. In spite of the urgency of combating climate change, the world will continue to use fossil fuels for heating and electricity generation. Anja-Isabel Dotzenrath, recruited by BP to head its gas and low-carbon businesses from 2022, said that gas would remain an important fuel in the transition to clean energy ‘for decades to come’, particularly in countries that were heavy coal users.28

Ben van Beurden, chief executive of Shell, has also said that oil and gas would continue to be important to the company. ‘There is going to be a place for our upstream business for many decades to come,’ he said.29 The great natural gas price spike that began in 2021 was due, in part, to a lack of wind that year to drive wind turbines and showed that exclusive reliance on renewable energy is a long way off.30

How should leaders in hard-to-shift industries such as energy and aviation deal with the continued opposition? There aren’t easy answers. It helps if, like Airbus, you show that you are energetically working on alternatives, but it is not a good idea to launch flurries of initiatives that disguise the continuance of your high-carbon business. Doing that attracts accusations of ‘greenwashing’, something that extends further than the industries we have just highlighted.

In 2021, Shell fell foul of greenwashing claims. The problem, predictably, came over carbon offsetting. Nine law students from the Free University in Amsterdam complained to the Dutch advertising watchdog about Shell’s offer to its petrol-buying customers that they could pay a little extra, which would go towards planting trees. The students said the company could not prove that the offsets were equivalent to the pollution caused by using the petrol. The advertising watchdog, in a preliminary ruling, sided with the students, saying that the offset offer was misleading. Shell said it would appeal, saying: ‘Shell’s “Drive CO2 Neutral” program is a genuine and important initiative to give consumers the option to offset CO2-emissions associated with the fuel they purchase.’31

Offsetting is not the only problem Shell has faced. It has seen splits in its top ranks over how far and fast its green push should be. In 2020, the FT reported that four Shell executives were leaving the company. ‘Not every move is known to be linked to frustration about the pace of change but people familiar with the internal debate said there were deep divisions over the timeframe for reducing the company’s dependence on oil and gas revenues, which had influenced at least some of the departing executives,’ the FT said. It quoted a person familiar with the situation saying, ‘People are really questioning if there will be any change at all.’32

What lesson should leaders draw from this? That setting targets and issuing statements, alongside offset offers to consumers, will not endure the close scrutiny that all green initiatives are now receiving. To avoid accusations of greenwashing, carbon-reducing and net zero targets have to be achievable and justifiable.

STEP BY STEP

Meeting the pressure to come up with climate-friendly measures and making sure they stand up to scrutiny can be daunting. FT commentator Brooke Masters had some advice in a 2021 column: ‘decarbonising takes thousands of tiny, boring steps’.33 Becoming sustainable often involves ambitious long-term goals and incremental moves. Brooke Masters gave this example: BMW is attempting the shift from petrol-driven to electric cars. But it discovered that far from reducing the manufacturer’s carbon output, the switch would increase the carbon footprint of its supply chain from 10 tonnes per vehicle in 2019 to 14 tonnes by 2030. This is because, as Brooke explained to me, electric car batteries are carbon-intensive; they rely on lithium mining and shipping. Batteries are also physically heavy to transport. ‘So, it is working with its 70,000 first- and second-tier suppliers to increase the use of recycled materials from 30 to 50 per cent and cut CO2 emissions in other ways to bring that average down to 8 tonnes instead,’ she wrote. How was BMW doing that? By rethinking every part of its process, from its design to its shopfloor tools. It would replace high-energy compressed air tools with electric ones. It would recycle the cast-offs from its aluminium parts to make new parts.

Brooke Masters also cited the UK retailer Iceland, which by investing in more efficient freezers, turning off its illuminated signs at night and cutting plastic packaging ‘have not only slashed Iceland’s carbon footprint by 74 per cent since 2011 but also saved money’.

This is the point we see repeatedly. Greening a business is not just about cutting carbon emissions: it is about rethinking every stage of the process, often helping to cut costs, boost profit margins and increase resilience. This is vital not just to the organisation’s future sustainability but to its credibility with shareholders. Yes, shareholders will support your decarbonisation policies. As we have seen in this chapter, they will increasingly insist on them. But they still expect decent long-term returns. The fate of Emmanuel Faber is a cautionary tale.

His commitment to running a sustainable Danone had deep roots. He had personal reasons to be committed to the idea of a purpose-led company. In a speech in 2016 at the HEC Paris business school, his alma mater, Faber told the graduating students about his brother, who suffered from schizophrenia and had severe breakdowns. Every day, his brother would record the sound of a nearby waterfall with his phone and leave ­Emmanuel a voicemail recording of it. Eventually, his brother died. Emmanuel told the students to listen out for the voice of a little brother or sister when they made their management decisions. He told them that his brother had brought him into contact with another world. Because of his experiences with his brother, he had slept alongside the homeless. He had visited the slums of New Delhi, Mumbai, Nairobi and Jakarta, as well as Aubervilliers, a deprived Parisian suburb not far from where the students were listening to him. What he had learned, he said, was that without social justice no economy could survive.34

Like Paul Polman, Faber believes that the prosperity of companies and of society are inseparable. Yet, in March 2021, Faber was forced out of Danone. ‘Emmanuel Faber’s seven years at the top of Danone ended at around 1.30am on Monday after a marathon virtual board meeting during which he battled to keep his job,’ the FT reported.35

The problem was that Danone’s share price had performed poorly and Faber had cut Danone’s annual profit forecasts three times in seven years. ‘It is all well and good to topple the statue of Milton Friedman,’ one adviser told the FT. ‘You can do that when your financial performance is better than competitors and your governance is above reproach, but if they aren’t, then it is going to be a problem.’

What is important, though, is that, even though dissatisfaction with Faber had risen to the point that his continuation as CEO had become impossible, the investors did not repudiate Danone’s sustainability policies. Nicolas Ceron of Bluebell Capital Partners, an investment firm, told the FT: ‘We never called into question Danone’s ESG investments, and we care a lot about these topics.’ But, he said, this didn’t mean commercial performance didn’t matter: ‘Their competitors . . . also make ESG a priority, yet have better financial results. Our issue with Faber was not ideological but operational.’

This is a constant challenge for leaders. Society and, crucially, investors insist today that companies demonstrate that they are supporting the fight against climate change. But they have to find ways of doing it that do not undermine long-term shareholder returns.

In a speech to the United Nations general assembly in September 2021, in the run-up to the COP26 summit, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said, to some derision on social media: ‘Kermit the frog sang “it’s not easy being green”. I want you to know that he was wrong. It is easy. It’s not only easy, it’s lucrative.’

As we have seen, Boris Johnson was wrong and Kermit the frog was right. It’s not easy being green. Ask Emanuel Faber. But, with steady incremental improvement in your processes and those of your suppliers, being green can be lucrative, as well as popular.

FURTHER READING

This is a clear account of Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions – those your organisation makes directly, those it makes indirectly and those it makes along your value chain, from suppliers to customer use – by Deloitte, with associated articles: ‘Scope 1, 2 and 3 emmisions’, available at: www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/focus/climate-change/zero-in-on-scope-1-2-and-3-emissions.html?gclid=CjwKCAjw7rWKBhAtEiwAJ3CWLMVpi6cmEFuJAjtwuZYP88535U9YVR5HGZe_BmBRLZaPVSFKfFYpeBoC5voQAvD_BwE.

FT journalist Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson provides a good roundup of sustainability issues, from greenwashing to reporting standards in ‘Business can stop the ESG backlash by proving it’s making a difference’, available at: www.ft.com/content/2e77a83b-bf88-4efb-8294-31db74db03c5.