Business 'ants' will win in long run

There’s a special kind of tormented satisfaction reserved for people like Lord Nicholas Stern and companies like Comverge, 1E, EnerNOC, GridPoint and other energy management specialists.

The satisfaction comes from their knowing that money spent the right ways today can yield far greater savings over the long run. It’s true in dealing with the global costs of climate change, as Lord Stern pointed out to the world, and it’s also true for implementing smarter energy strategies and technologies to reduce consumption and costs.

The torment, however, comes from the discouraging reality that too many organisations would rather not spend any money at all then spend it the right way for long-term benefit. Faced with a plethora of evidence showing that climate- or energy-saving investments are more than worth it over time, a large proportion of governments and businesses continue to insist on saying, “Eh, no thanks.”

It’s the classic tale of industrious, hard-working ant versus business-as-usual, enjoy-it-while-you’ve-got-it grasshopper.

Look at just one part of our energy landscape: how we travel from here to there. Many of us instinctively hop into our cars rather than take our bikes or walk to the bus stop (if there is one locally), even for short trips, because it’s quick, easy and convenient. And governments, knowing this, keep encouraging this monkey on our backs by building more roads and highway lanes … because our bad habits generate gas tax revenues that — in the US at least — must be spent largely on, you got it, roads and highway lanes.

That approach, though, ignores many costly externalities. The UK, for example, estimates that urban transportation delays cost the economy up to £11 billion per year, while carbon emissions impact society to the tune of £4 billion annually. The love affair with cars costs another £25 billion per year in health impacts from pollution, noise and not enough exercise, and we spend some £9 billion a year dealing with the effects of traffic accidents. That’s almost £50 billion each year — which makes the government’s total allocation of £560 million for local and sustainable transport funds seem like a pittance.

As plenty of experts have already noted, it’s human nature to take what we can get now rather than wait a while to get more later. The problem, in a world facing looming energy restraints, is that continuing to mindlessly consume precious resources today means we’ll have a lot less at our disposal in the near future. How organisations choose to deal with that reality will eventually separate the ants from the grasshoppers.