“What can we dooo?”

Above: the Prince of Wales pub - friendly, smoky (last time I was in there was before the smoking ban), a good starting point for any pub crawl around the north side of town.

Sorry to keep talking about last night’s television, but I use this blog as a place where I can jot down thoughts before I forget them. It’s more organised than lots of scraps of paper. Also, I am more disciplined about writing properly if I am going to put something up in a public place.

Anyway, last night’s Newsnight looked at environmental politics with the suggestion that British politicians are becoming indifferent about policies to protect the environment because: 1) it is too difficult to convince voters to change their behaviour, and 2) whatever we do in the United Kingdom is meaningless unless followed by similar action in India and China.

This attitude reminded me of my first job, which was in a large national organisation with many thousands of staff. The office where I worked had a manager who had completely lost control of the fifty or so people who reported to him. Thus there were incidences of staff turning up drunk (very regular), staff going off “sick” (so routine it was planned into the rosters), and even cleaners becoming abusive and hurling rubbish bins around just because someone pointed out their section hadn’t been dusted for a month.

It meant that the fifty per cent of the staff who were responsible had to do their own work plus the work of the fifty per cent of staff who were just coasting along. Whenever anyone complained to the office manager he would hold out his hands and (in a whining voice) say “What can we dooo?” In many ways he could do nothing, since the root problem was unionised job security, and he had superiors who would not support him in any clash with the union.

But I digress. It is not acceptable for the government, in the style of that long-retired (I hope) office manager, to just hold out their collective hands and whine “What can we dooo?” It is fashionable for government members to deride the Prince of Wales, but I suggest that one of the POW’s initiatives might give a lead to resolving the conundrum of co-ordinating international environmental action.

In a later (much happier) job I worked in the marketing department of a company which held a Royal Warrant. It fell to the marketing department to make sure the company never lost the Royal Warrant, and also we were tasked with looking at ways of achieving the Prince of Wales Warrant. To achieve the POW Warrant the company had to have a track record of at least five years as an organisation meeting the international environmental standard ISO 14001 (which meant that all our suppliers also had to be working towards the ISO 14001 standard, creating a virtuous impetus out along the supply chain).

India and China are (certainly in the short to medium term) dependent upon exporting manufactured goods to the West. If the European Union and United States were to require all imported manufactured goods to have come from ISO 14001 registered companies (with say a five year adjustment time) the issue of environmental sustainability would become self-regulating. Western manufacturers would also, obviously, have to achieve the standard.

And so, in my usual very simplistic way, I have solved the problem of international climate change.

More on ISO 14001: http://www.iso14000-iso14001-environmental-management.com/

Kim Blacha’s Song of the Day is No Time by Just Jack (I asked her for something with an end-of-the-world feel).