Gorillas in our Midst: Telling Business about Climate Change’s Unmentionable Secrets

SSEE Senior Research Fellow,  Dr Mick Blowfield, hosted a series of four seminars during Michaelmas Term 2011 discussing inconvenient questions relating to businesses and climate change.

Series Summary: Here’s a dilemma. The most beautiful creature in the room has bad breath. Do you reach for the Listerine or do you kiss them anyway?  In the climate change room we are being asked to hug various beautiful creatures, but how many of them are gorillas with bad breath?  In this seminar series leading thinkers and practitioners on business and climate change will expose where the gorillas are, and why we should take them seriously if we are serious about the climate change challenge.

 This is the third annual Smith School autumn series on business and sustainability, and topics included:

 -          capital markets and long-term sustainability

-          transformational gaps in the private sector

-          educating business leaders

-          prosperity without growth

Seminars in the Series:

• Unburnable Carbon: the London Stock Exchange and its love-in with the fossil fuel industry, Mark Campanale (Carbon Tracker).
• Can Financial Markets Ever Be Sustainable?, Nick Robins (HSBC).
• Innovators and incumbents: The next wave of growth?, SSEE Business Fellows Jeremy Bentham, Leo Johnson and Peter Lacy.
• Making Sense of Climate Change: the Limits of Education, Mike Peirce (University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership).