For a small business such as ours maintaining a healthy cash flow is a must. Cash comes into the business when invoices are paid. A recent survey showed that Australian businesses were on average now waiting 58 days for invoices to be paid. This means that for most businesses the cash that will come into the business in April is dependent on what the business invoices now in February. There is lag between when the work is done and when it is paid for. Failure to invoice enough in February could result in a business running out of cash in April. And when there is no cash, there is no business.

Climate change is similar. The carbon we put into the atmosphere now influences the climate well into the future. However rather that a time span of weeks or months, its decades. Todays carbon emissions will influence the climate for decades to come. So to get a stable climate in the future we need to cut greenhouse gas pollution NOW.

Many years ago a friend “temporarily” left the shell of a model T Ford in my front yard as he had no space to store it. Its still there. I haven’t asked my friend to take it away because it reminds me that some of the carbon that car generated over its lifetime is still in the atmosphere driving climate change.

Since climate change is like cash flow, if we want a stable climate as we grow older, and for the sake of our children and grandchildren, we need to be acting now.

I received yesterday a powerpoint about food security and climate change from Dr. Julie Cliff, a friend of mine who has worked in tropical medicine in Mozambique for the last 30 years. Her powerpoint had a dramatic image of cassava plants grown in laboratory conditions at different atmospheric concentrations of CO2 (shown below). Cassava is a staple crop whose tubers are consumed across southern and central Africa. The plants grown at higher concentrations of CO2 produced tubers with less than half of the useful food of the plants grown at lower CO2 concentration.

Yesterday I also met an economist who showed me some modelling that predicted the effect a $50 per tonne carbon price would have on the cost of employment across a range of sectors, such as manufacturing, banking and insurance, etc. Typically the cost was around $2,000 per employee – or in other words the modelling was predicting that business expenses would increase by $2,000 per employee if we had a carbon price of $50 a tonne.

These two viewpoints clearly show the apparent climate change challenge – one which shows that the response to climate change could be expensive, the other that not acting could have dire consequences for food security in southern and central Africa. This is the classic argument that I referred to in my first blog post – the climate change challenge is framed in a way that we lose economically if we act to limit greenhouse gas emissions now – but if we don’t act we will lose in the future.

So what is my climate positive take on this? More in my next posting – and comments welcome.

In the Hans Christian Anderson fairytale an emperor is proudly dressed in clothes that supposedly only the wise can see until a boy shouts out “the emperor has no clothes”.

When it comes to the climate change response the seemingly obvious first step, to a large extent, is being obscured. The first step being simply using less energy. The emperor isn’t totally naked – he might have underwear on – but to a large extent energy conservation – or using less energy - isn’t being pursued with the vigour it should be. And in a world in economic crisis – where saving energy saves money -  its crazy to be focussing the climate change debate on how much we need to spend rather than how much we can save.

There is common consensus that to slow climate change, to avoid run-away global warming, to provide a stable climate for future generations that we need to urgently reduce carbon emissions now. Some very experienced, respected and prominent climate change scientists, such as James Hansen, are saying that we actually need to go beyond reducing carbon emissions, we need to actually remove carbon from the air, as atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are already far too high.

The obvious starting point to solving the climate change challenge is using less energy, and thus producing less carbon.

• Obvious because using less energy results in money being saved, not spent.
• Obvious because the money saved can then be invested in cleaner power sources.
• Obvious because in the current economic climate we all want to cut expenses.

Using less energy is clearly a win – win. It reduces carbon emissions. It saves money. To put it bluntly it’s a no-brainer.

Substituting fossil fuel power sources with clean energy sources comes next on the list. But this doesn’t give the financial return of energy conservation, as renewable power is still more expensive than black power.

Along with the switch from fossil fuel to renewable energy sources comes sequestration – removing carbon out of the atmosphere. This however costs money too.

So in order to minimise the cost of response to climate change the obvious strategy, to me anyway, is to reduce energy consumption, thus saving some money, then use the savings to purchase green power and fund carbon offsets. And becoming carbon positive, so that the net impact is extraction of carbon from the atmosphere. And to do this as fast as possible. Wouldn’t you agree?

Now the exciting thing is that if pursued vigorously, with focus, the savings from energy conservation – or energy efficiency, will more than cover the cost of green-power and the carbon offsets needed. So even becoming carbon positive can be a win-win.

An example is our office. We have a strong culture of energy conservation. Our energy consumption is around 1/3rd of the consumption of other offices the same size. This saving pays for 100% green power, carbon offsets, and some additional carbon sequestration over and beyond offsetting our organisation’s travel related emissions. We are saving money, and are climate positive. How good is that?!

Unfortunately however the climate change debate is largely centred around costs. The very real threat of dangerous climate change is compared with the cost of responding to it. A lose-lose scenario comes through strongly. Do nothing and planetary climate stability is at risk. Do something to avoid dangerous climate change and the economic system as we know it is at risk.

But this attitude is very dangerous because it causes paralysis. Why do anything if you will only lose no matter what you do?

However for many organisations, the savings from an aggressive carbon conservation approach will pay for the cost of becoming carbon neutral or even carbon positive. I am not saying that in all cases that carbon neutrality can be achieved at no cost, but based on my experience with thousands of buildings, if a choice is made to aggressively conserve carbon in many cases climate neutrality can be achieved and money left on the table.

In fact the carbon inefficiencies in most organisations are so gross – wasteful buildings, fat car fleets, very poor use of carbon saving communication technologies – that I believe the developed world could become carbon neutral at no net cost – if carbon conservation is passionately pursued. (And we build renewable generation fast enough and have the capacity to sequester any remaining emissions).

Finally, even if becoming carbon neutral or climate positive does come at a cost, is this cost going to destroy your organisation? For the vast majority of businesses the cost of energy is around 1 % of total operating revenue. Even if energy costs doubled in order to achieve carbon neutrality would that force the company into bankruptcy? I doubt it.

Significant carbon conservation requires cultural changes in attitudes to energy, no doubt about it. But with a positive approach to the challenge of climate change, and passionate carbon conservation, we might just create a world with a stable climate that is cleaner, greener and wealthier.