SIR Crispin Tickell knows what he would have done with the Brent Spar. He would have allowed Shell UK to sink it on the basis that this was probably the best option. But if the oil rig had been dumped in the Atlantic, would there have been such a lively debate about the wider issue of industry's responsibility for the environment?
A year after Greenpeace forced Shell into a humiliating climbdown, Brent Spar hung like a rusting hulk over the proceedings of a recent conference in Cardiff which brought industdalists and journalists together under the banner "Reporting the Environment Capitalism Goes Green". Shell UK was there, too, still obviously shell shocked by its famous defeat.
Sir Crispin, a former British permanent representative at the UN, felt that none of the parties in the Brent Spar controversy emerged with credit.
"Even if Shell's science was better than Greenpeace's, it signally failed to put up a good defence of its position and displayed weakness under pressure," he said.
"Yet in a curious, serendipitous fashion, the outcome may be good."
Shell UK's chairman, Dr Chris Fay, admitted that Shell had been slow to appreciate that the main focus of the Greenpeace campaign was not the British audience, but people in other countries less familiar with the local context. Thus, the growing challenge facing all multinational companies was how to communicate effectively across borders in "today's global village".
Not so long ago, such companies were perceived as practically invincible. Huge organisations with immense resources, often larger than a single country's GNP, could do more or less what they wanted. But then Greenpeace occupied the Brent Spar, flashed its own TV footage around the world, and many Dutch and Germans responded by boycotting Shell's petrol.
It was a "defining moment" for Shell. And what the controversy underlined, according to Sir Crispin, was the need for all companies to take responsibility for the safe disposal of their products. "This should lead to a new awareness of the need to build the disposal of a product into its original design, whether it be an oil rig, a nuclear power station, a refrigerator or a car".
To that extent, Greenpeace had a point. But Robert San George, director of communications at the World Wide Fund for Nature, felt that although the dramatic visual images of its activists jumping out of helicopters and climbing onto an oil platform was great theatre, it was really just a "side show" that distracted from the world's major environmental problems.
San George listed these as follows global climate change, with its succession of severe storms, droughts and heat waves and likely impacts on agriculture and coastal regions the continuing destruction of the world's forests and wetlands, the exhaustion of its fisheries and the alarming loss of the Earth's biological diversity, which he described as an "ongoing catastrophe".
IT SEEMS unlikely that oil companies such as Shell will choose to do much about climate change they are, after all, in the fossil fuel business. The oil companies and most of the oil producing countries support the Global Climate Coalition, which argues that there is no verifiable link between carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and global warming and, hence, no need to do anything about burning fossil fuels.
But most large companies are increasingly conscious of their public image and this encompasses the environmental dimension. Even General Motors, for long a major bete noire, produces an annual report detailing progress on making its activities more environment friendly for example, by achieving a 130 per cent increase in the fuel efficiency of its gas guzzling cars since 1974.
The company, once demonised by Ralph Nader in his book, Unsale at Any Speed now says it is committed to a set of six environmental principles, such as "reducing waste, conserving resources and recycling materials at every stage of the product life cycle" and "vigorously pursuing the development and implementation of technologies for minimising pollutant emissions".
Perhaps General Motors even accepts that the global economy in which it is such a big player is merely "a division of the biosphere", as green campaigner Jonathon Porritt suggested. But Mr Porritt also noted that there was still a "profound ignorance" of environmental issues in the stock markets and no mandatory requirement on companies to report on the impact of their activities.
Still, enlightened company chairmen can make a difference. Take Sir John Banham, chairman of Tarmac plc and former director general of the Confederation of British Industry. He heads a company which employs over 20,000 people and has an annual turnover of £3 billion. It is also in the environmental front line, having run the gauntlet of protest over its road building programme.
Sir John said Tarmac might have bought its way out of trouble and criticism. It could have adopted a much lower profile, hiding behind its client, the British Ministry of Transport, in the hope and expectation that the green tide" would recede.
Instead, he saw to it that Tarmac engaged its own environmental advisory panel of eminent experts to advance the public debate. Announcing the panel's first annual report, he stressed it was genuinely independent, well informed, constructive and controversial.
"We have, quite deliberately, set out to address a series of issues that some of Tarmac's public clients would doubtless wish to see kept under the wraps in Whitehall," such as the "madness" of Britain's road planning process.
In bidding for the controversial Newbury by pass, Tarmac "made it plain to the Ministry that, if selected, we would insist on the panel putting forward its own detailed proposals for managing the environmental challenges posed by the chosen route before it is too late". And if "the bureaucracy" insisted on the cheapest solution, it should explain its reasoning publicly.
Sir John felt that "building roads through beautiful countryside is not the answer". Transport policy needed to be viewed in a broader context, including such measures as traffic calming, staggered school hours to reduce congestion, better public transport and road pricing levying tolls on those who insist on driving their cars in urban areas during peak periods.
Given this sort of thinking by the chairman of a company which builds roads for a living, it is clear that the environmental message is being taken on board at least by some captains of industry and that this also reflects the public will. Contrary to the view of a one time newspaper executive in Britain, in sacking its distinguished correspondent, Geoffrey Lean, the environment is not "yesterday's story".
Indeed, according to Jonathon Porritt, we "ain't seen nothing yet". If the world's population continues to grow, putting more and more pressure on natural resources, "what we're seeing now with the BSE crisis is only a sliver of what we'll see in the future. Just wait for the debate about gender bending chemicals," which have been implicated in reproductive disorders.
David Gee, a former British trade union official who now works with the European Environmental Agency, picked up this threat, too. He argued strongly for the "precautionary principle", quoting the 1992 Rio Declaration which said that "full scientific evidence shall not be used as an excuse for postponing cost effective measures to prevent environmental degradation".
What the precautionary principle means, in the words of Sir Crispin Tickell, is that we should not allow uncertainty to obstruct preventive action. If it had been part of the common currency in the past, it might have prevented the manufacture of asbestos, thalidomide, CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) and at least some pesticides. But he also believed that perhaps catastrophes were needed to make progress.
Amazingly, for a company chairman, Sir John Banham quoted an old farmer's saying "You should live your life as though you will die tomorrow, and you should farm your land as though you will live forever". Or, as Sir Crispin put it "Be a good ancestor". Either way, these are adages which sum up the much touted concept of "sustainable development".
