Courtesy of Jack Sloop, Unsplash
When we first sold our company in 2018, I got asked about our story a bit. The part people pay closest attention to is the secret bit, as they see it, at least. What did we do or know that helped make us successful.
My answers are rather predictable. There were no templates to follow beyond common sense and we relied on faith and persistence. Lots of it.
There was one factor which stood out as significant and constant throughout the years of owning and growing our business and it had nothing to do with us.
We had help from a competitor who did a far better job of growing the market than we could ever do.
You might have heard of them. They’re called Google and their ownership of YouTube helped us enormously.
Whatever we did with our own limited resources, was nothing compared to the everyday volume of evidence which YouTube provided on their platform. When we visited dealerships, groups and eventually manufacturers, they’d already been subliminally warmed up. Many individuals we met had at some point had an entertaining or helpful YouTube experience. They could relate to video, which helped us to build our business.
YouTube even had a small, persuasive UK team whose only job was to encourage the automotive sector to try using video as a promotional tool.
We were very grateful, now I’ll get to the point.
Justine Tot in a recent Guardian article was wringing her hands about how helpless she was feeling, brought on by the constant bombardment of climate calamity. It’s almost impossible to avoid the headlines these days, unless you’re good at tuning out.
July 2023 is now famous for being the hottest month on record with damaging wildfires in Canada and Greece, continuing to make the headlines this month (August 23) as well.
The idea of self-sacrifice for future generations does not sit comfortably when she freely admits that a lack of wifi can get her own blood boiling.
She’s not alone. We all have comfortable, carbon-intensive lives and we’re very happy with them, thank you very much.
But just like my earlier YouTube experience, video does work and vivid news headlines are difficult to forget. It has made many more of us conscious that we probably have a problem and we ought to think about doing something. How long before thinking turns to action?
Simone Weil, courtesy of www.revue-projet.com
Tot argues that our helplessness might be resolved if we behaved more like the French philosopher, Simone Weil, who died 80 years ago. Albert Camus called her the only great spirit of our time.
Raised in a well-off family, she decided to sacrifice all her advantages to stand side by side with marginalised people. She wanted to fight in the Spanish civil war and join the French resistance in the second, but was prevented for different reasons on both occasions.
In between teaching, she was a labour organiser in factories and on farms to better understand the manual labourers she was so keen to help.
Her philosophy was one that she practiced and lived, not a theoretical position, a comfortable conclusion arrived at through extensive reading.
To follow in her footsteps, we need some self-sacrifice. We have to start somewhere and do something. Fly less, don’t drive the car short distances, eat less meat.
I’d argue that lifestyle changes have been easier for a contrarian. Being drawn to a cause, in this case an irrefutable, undeniable disaster of one, which has barely begun in terms of human suffering is a no brainer.
But I have the privilege of choice and those choices have suited me. Isn’t real sacrifice to give up something valued for the sake of something or someone else?
Our Tesla Model Y has the quickest acceleration of any car I’ve ever owned. Being a vegetarian is good for me too. Not flying means I have to plan and enjoy the journey more. It also instils a sense of distance, which is wonderful.
Realistically, I still think we need government support through leadership and encouragement, every country does to solve our collective issue. Some of that encouragement, will at some point in the future, feel a lot more like sacrifice.
That is arguably already happening at local government level at least in London. A political spat has arisen with the further expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) to all London boroughs this week, 29th August 2023.
The current government lays the blame squarely on Sadiq Khan, the London Mayor and Labour party member. They’re accusing him of further expanding the boundaries in order to create a new cash-raising opportunity.
They seem to have forgotten that polluted air is already proven to increase asthma, strokes, lung cancers - there’s a long list of nasty ailments.
Instead they prefer the line that the labour party is no longer the friend of the driver, believing that this is a vote winner and the only reason why they retained the parliamentary seat of Uxbridge by that wafer-thin margin.
Jenny Jones, Courtesy of the BBC
As Jenny Jones, the Green party peer argues, a London-wide ULEZ should have been here much sooner. Why didn’t the government support a scrappage scheme to help small businesses and the less well-off a long time ago?
Instead, the government has decided that it’s far more convenient to offload the responsibility for clean air on local authorities while refusing to help resource the problem.
The easiest way to successfully change a bad habit is to tax it out of existence. Removing the worst polluting vehicles is a start in London. Why not start taxing people on miles travelled in cars and planes.
The UK government of the day, is at some point going to need to raise new revenues when the taxes raised from fuel start to fall away after 2030. If the electricity remains relatively cheap or free for householders with solar panels and storage capacity, then why not tax miles driven.
Draconian, big brother? Absolutely. Rail against it. But the window of opportunity to decarbonise to safe limits is diminishing fast. We, can’t be trusted to do the right thing without a little or a lot of encouragement. Tax is a very effective way to create those environmentally friendly changes.
Another way out of our predicament might be through scientific discovery.
Only this week I read about methanotrophs, a group of bacteria which naturally convert methane to carbon dioxide and biomass.
Methane is a deadly greenhouse gas, 85 times the warming power of Carbon Dioxide for the first 20 years on release into the earth’s atmosphere. It originates from the production and transportation of coal, natural gas and oil.
Agriculture is the single biggest contributor of methane through livestock manure and windy cows.
To make a difference, the methane-eating bacteria need to be scaled up significantly, with thousands of bio-reactors in place. Presumably, these will be situated in fields full of cow pats? It also assumes that there is a business case for such an investment in the first place.
Or we could look at agricultural policy and make some radical changes around the availability of beef.
Or make flaring illegal in the oil industry. It has just been discovered that the amount of methane which escapes into the earth’s atmosphere is five times greater than current industry thinking.
Do all of them.
This government has shown its total disdain for the climate and the environment. Scrapping the EV subsidy, sewage in rivers and beaches, reduction in funding for DEFRA, banning on shore wind farms, Rishi flying everywhere by private jet or helicopter, issuing 100 drilling licenses etc… The only interest they do show is when they can score political points against the opposition such as criticising ULEZ or when they can enrich themselves. I’m a local parish councillor (it’s a start) and even at this level the frustration is palpable. A prime example being developers being blocked due to local considerations and then given permission on appeal to the government ( nothing to do with Tory party donations) . Developers account for 20% of Tory party donations and the government recently scrapped the ‘red tape’ ensuring developers met their environmental responsibilities. The story was then spun that they were enabling more houses to be built. Your writings have make me think about how much government policy is affected by the climate and the environment. Carry on 🙂