Heilemann Climate Action Guide

Climate protection for businesses. Practical. Sustainable. Effective.
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-3-86774-712-7
Verlag: Murmann Publishers
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

Drought, forest fires, and melting ice caps: the climate crisis is an existential threat to human life on Earth. The Paris Climate Agreement shows that the actions of governments alone will not be enough to prevent a climate catastrophe.

For Ferry Heilemann, digital entrepreneur and founder of the Leaders for Climate Action initiative, one thing is therefore very clear: businesspeople need to do their bit to contribute towards global climate protection. How can a business measure its own carbon footprint? How can CO² emissions be reduced in the shortest time possible? What specific steps are required to achieve this? And how can effective alliances be built up between businesses and their surroundings?

With the aid of precise checklists, recommendations for practical action, and background knowledge, the Climate Action Guide shows how businesses can implement straightforward measures and make an important contribution to the protection of our planet – in the process also making themselves future-proof. The first action guide for businesses which want to take practical action to protect the climate.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Heilemann, Ferry

Fachgebiete

• Geowissenschaften Umweltwissenschaften Klimawandel, Globale Erwärmung
• Geowissenschaften Umweltwissenschaften Umweltschutz, Umwelterhaltung
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Betriebswirtschaft Bereichsspezifisches Management Betriebliches Energie- und Umweltmanagement

Leseproben

CHAPTER 1
WE NEED TO ACT NOW
THE THREAT WE FACE IF THOSE IN THE BUSINESS WORLD FAIL TO SHOULDER THEIR RESPONSIBILITIES The fact that we can’t go on like this is something we have known for a long time. Pretty much since 1859. This was when Edwin L. Drake was sent to Titusville, Pennsylvania, because his superiors at the recently founded Seneca Oil Company suspected that there might be oil under their property there. They wanted Drake to promote it, marketing it as a fuel for oil lamps. At the time there had never been a successful attempt at drilling a commercial oil well, and Drake too ran into technical problems. He spent more than a year in his wooden shack, driving the drill down through earth and rock. But then he struck lucky. On 27th August 1859, when he had drilled down to a depth of 21 metres, he hit the greasy black liquid.1 In that very same year, the Irish scientist and passionate mountaineer John Tyndall was trying to answer a very different question. The earth radiates heat which originates from the sun, and he wanted to know whether there really were gases in the atmosphere which could absorb this heat and send it back down to the ground. French mathematician and physicist Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier had already hypothesised, and outlined, this natural greenhouse effect more than 30 years before, but had not been able to prove it. Tyndall, on the other hand, managed precisely this in his laboratory. He confirmed that — alongside hydrogen, methane and other gases — carbon dioxide (CO2) is able to hold heat within the earth’s atmosphere. The higher the concentration, the higher the temperature.2 The birth of the “age of oil” was thus accompanied by a new understanding of the consequences of burning fossil fuels. We have now had more than 160 years to draw the right conclusions from the works of these two pioneers, Edwin L. Drake and John Tyndall. But not a lot has happened. To this very day, even following the Paris Agreement of 2015, we still produce vast quantities of CO2. Even the COVID-19 pandemic, which in 2020 led to a seven percent reduction in emissions, does not mark any change in the general trend, which shows barely any signs of reversing. This makes it all the more important finally to do something, and to convert the knowledge we have had for so long into action. Image based on data from PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency Who, if not we businesspeople, could be predestined for this role? Whilst individual consumers and members of the public might have very little influence, with political decisions commonly being based on the lowest common denominator, businesspeople have quite a bit of leverage and room to be creative. They can implement decisions of great consequence with great rapidity, and they are used to doing so. My hope, therefore, is that the business world will contribute a decisive stimulus, spurring the world on towards a carbon-neutral economy. From baking waffles to the Google deal The kinds of changes that can be made are something I experienced even as a schoolboy. Together with my brother Fabian, I bought a machine for making ChiChis, a French style of waffle. At big events, such as Kieler Woche (Kiel Week) we sold them from a home-made trailer. It was a stressful business, and not without its own risks, but some weekends we would make as much as 1,000 euros each. Quite a lot of money for a teenager; so much, in fact, that we were even able to employ our friends. Having completed my studies at the WHU business school in 2009, and thinking back to this first entrepreneurial experience, Fabian and I started something new: DailyDeal, an internet couponing portal. Yet again, we were the novices in a competitive, extremely aggressive environment; yet again, it was strenuous; and yet again, we were lucky and successful. Within six months, the business had grown to 100 employees, and before even two years had passed we were able to sell DailyDeal to Google with over 350 employees. We stayed on board, and I worked in Silicon Valley for a while, but when, after a solid year of success, the new parent company made a strategic realignment, we bought our company back. We made it profitable — and then finally sold it to a German competitor. The start of my climate action journey It was during this period that I started to look at questions relating to sustainability and the climate crisis. What might, from today’s perspective, look like a straight and determined path began with me feeling my way around, searching. At first, I had no idea where my interest and increasing enthusiasm would take me, nor how I would be able to implement my privately-held concerns in my professional life. Before doing anything else, I just had to take a couple of steps in order to gain a bit more confidence. But I always knew that I had to change something. My consumption of meat, for example. That was my way of getting started. For 2015, I set myself the aim of no longer eating any factory-farmed meat. Food scandals had given me cause for thought. A cheeseburger made with beef mince from the rainforest and sold over here for a euro? That could not possibly be sustainable, so for me it was no longer an option. At some point, I simply stopped eating meat and fish altogether, and nowadays my diet is largely vegan. After reading the Wikipedia entry on climate change, I then read Al Gore’s book The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change and other works (such as Ten Billion by Stephen Emmot), switched to a power company which generates all of its power from renewable sources, swapped all the lightbulbs in my flat for LEDs, and installed a solar panel on our roof so that I could generate my own green energy. I drastically reduced the number of flights I took, swapped my petrol car for an electric one, and when I go on business trips within Germany I only travel by rail. In terms of our professional life at that time, Fabian and I were wondering how to move on, what to set up next. Together with our co-founders, we discussed cleantech ideas, but we decided that it would be best to take on the logistics market, which was still largely analogue. Sustainability had a role to play from the very beginning. At Forto, which is the name of the digital freight forwarding company we founded in early 2016, we measure our climate footprint and reduce emissions of greenhouse gases wherever we can, and have also been offsetting the remaining emissions from the very beginning. We now offer our customers transparency when it comes to the footprint of their shipment, and provide an incentive to offset. With the creation of Forto, my desire to share my experience and ideas with others also grew. With every presentation I was given the opportunity to make, such as at the national conference for freight transport set up by the then Federal Minister of Transport, Alexander Dobrindt, or at the annual meeting for family businesses, I always showed the same five slides, which addressed the climate crisis and the question of how we might take action to avert drastic consequences. The next step came in 2019. Together with my brother and some friends who are also in business, I started up Leaders for Climate Action (LFCA), a network of businesspeople which now counts more than 1,000 entrepreneurs and managing directors from the digital sector among its members. Our aim is to bring professionals from the world of business together so that they can support each other, learn from each other, and use this knowledge to achieve maximum levels of climate action within their businesses and their business environment, such as supply chains, and to take action in politics for better climate legislation. I have decided that, from now on, I will invest my time and energy only in matters which concern the climate. The crisis with which we are faced threatens everything I love and treasure, and everything I am grateful for: my family and friends, the natural world, our democratic system, entrepreneurial freedom and, ultimately, human civilisation as we know it today. We are playing fast and loose with these treasures and achievements. A combination of greed, egocentricity and short-sightedness means that we fail to defend them adequately from our own destructive power, and continue to plod along the path of business as usual. Some stick their heads in the sand, believing that there is nothing they can do. Others are like addicts, unable to stop, always needing their next consumption hit. We’re not saving the planet, we’re saving our standard of living In all of this, it has become clear that the climate crisis will not produce any winners. There will only be losers. And we are the only ones who can change anything. The climate and the planet could not care less what we do. They do not need any protection. Over the course of their 4.5-billion-year history, they have seen changes of far greater magnitude: hot periods with average global temperatures of over 50 degrees centigrade, and atmospheric CO2 concentrations of up to 10 percent at times. And periods of cold, during which today’s tropics were trapped under several hundred metres of ice.3 Even over the past 500 million years carbon dioxide concentrations have oscillated, with peaks between 4,000 and 6,000 parts per million (ppm). Over time, seas, organisms and plants developed. These took the carbon dioxide out of the...

Über Autor(innen)

Ferry Heilemann is an entrepreneur, an investor, and a climate activist. In 2009, after completing his degree course, he and his brother Fabian founded DailyDeal, the first European couponing portal. They later sold the company to Google. Heilemann also founded Forto, a digital freight forwarding company, built up a team of more than 300 employees, and then, in the summer of 2020, moved to a position on the shareholder advisory board in order to be able to put more of his efforts into the fight against climate change. One of his projects in this area has been co-founding the Leaders for Climate Action initiative, whose goal is to make the entire digital industry climate neutral. In 2020, he was named "Germany's top entrepreneur".