Up until quite recently we’ve been very allergic to associating our business with climate change. We live in a country where climate change has unfortunately become a partisan issue. As a business, taking a position on climate change has historically bundled you with a particular side. Therefore, we have tiptoed around the issue - seldom mentioning the elephant in the room.
This month we decided to change that. An alliance has now been formed with “This is Not Business as Usual” - a large group of Australian business that recognise the urgency of addressing climate change. Future Super, Atlassian, Keep Cup, Spaceship and hundreds of other businesses have joined this organisation. This is a group of businesses committed to supporting the climate strikes on 20 September. Our employees will take a long lunch to attend the rallies.
In the absence of climate change leadership, business must lead.
In the 12 months alone, humanity has witnessed some terrifying events:
Greenland's ice is melting at the rate scientists thought would be our worst-case scenario in 2070
Wildfires in Australia, California, Siberia, Brazil and Indonesia, that are bigger and more destructive than ever before
Temperature record are broken across the globe, nearly every year
Despite this, governments across the globe either deny the science of climate change (e.g. the USA, Brazil), actively delaying decarbonisation and fostering carbon intensive industries (e.g. Australia, Poland) or simply not implementing policy measures aligned to the urgency of the issue (most of the G20 governments).
It has gotten to the point where our children are demanding more action than we are.
The irony of all this is that solutions to climate change do exist today. In many cases these solutions are cheaper than the “dirty” solutions they are replacing. The solutions are business opportunities.
Businesses can make money from solutions
Whilst we haven’t publicised until now, New Energy Ventures has a mission to:
Make energy cleaner and cheaper for all Australians by helping businesses adopt and sell new energy products and services.
In our experience, the solutions to climate change are not a cost, but a business opportunity. We work with our clients and partners to unlock those opportunities, bringing to the fore all our skills and expertise to make them possible.
And for our clients, they can be lucrative. For example, let’s take property developers - one area in which we work. Our work has found that:
Solar and storage within greenfield estates can lower network connection costs, by as much as 60% in some areas.
New urban communities can achieve zero net-energy and carbon neutrality but also generate positive developer returns in excess of 15% (up to 40% within embedded networks)
New energy technology can provide customers with a key differentiator in a sluggish property market, and increasing energy cost concerns.
But change needs to come quicker
Even with all this opportunity, we are not moving fast enough to solve climate change or transition Australia’s economy. Businesses, in particular, must accept the need to lead.
Businesses can demonstrate they have solutions, engage governments to remove barriers to those solutions, make purchasing decisions that drive change and support their employees to stand alongside their children to demand more action.
We as a business are supporting the climate strikes on the 20 September and other future climate strikes. If your business and its employees are as concerned about climate change as we are, we encourage you to join us and show leadership on this issue.
What we’ll never change
New Energy Ventures is committed as ever to assisting our clients to create new projects, products and ventures that are profitable and sustainable.
The commercial imperative is always a key determinant for recommendation we make, this won’t change. We will continue to be pragmatic and objective with our advice.
What is great though, is we will probably never have to compromise.
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