Yesterday, I did my annual 2-hour session with MSc students at Imperial College London, now rebranded as Imperial. A great group of students - and a stimulating exchange. One question I didn’t have an immediate answer to was whether someone had ever rocked my world to its foundations as I have long aspired to do with business leaders and other powerful people - the subject of my forthcoming book, Tickling Sharks: How We Sold Business On Sustainability (Fast Company Press, May).
I still can’t remember such an occasion, though the answers probably lie mainly in long ago books - among them Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.
Later, as I walked off the campus with Mike Tennant, who is director of the MSc in Environmental Technology and has convened the Business and the Environment option since 2008, I was struck by the way that the scaffolding around the Queen’s Tower looked like a Chinese pagoda, or similar.
Then, in this morning’s Financial Times, there was an exposé of how Imperial scientists have been working on novel materials (some with defence-related applications) alongside companies linked to China’s armed forces and military sector. Only a few years back, such joint working would have been celebrated; now, not so much. Instead, it seems to me that we will see a lot more controversies like this as the sustainability sector scales and the pro ceases of deglobalization evolve.
Much of the tension will focus on China’s so-called “new three” – or xin san yang – which are solar cells, lithium-ion batteries, and EVs. The term refers back to the concept of the “old three” that were once the pillars of China’s exports: clothing, home appliances and furniture. The sustainability sector, like it or not, is mustdecide how it wants to trade off its own earth security agenda against the priorities of the more narrowly defined security and defence sector.