Working for the planet

December 12, 2009
Nelson businessman Andrew Booth was behind this week's report predicting that large parts of the city will disappear under water if climate change is not tackled. As Geoff Collett learns, he has a long history of drawing public attention to environmental issues.
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The Nelson sunlight is streaming through the big windows in the Hardy St office of Andrew Booth's latest venture, and fittingly so. Solar energy is what he's all about these days: the next stage in a lifetime of fighting to save the planet.
Compared with where he's come from, it might seem a bit underwhelming - a bit mild-mannered, maybe.
In his youth, he was a key figure in Greenpeace in his native England, rising to lead its national campaigns and securing a place on its international board and frequently throwing himself directly in harm's way in the organisation's high-profile campaigns. After that, he helped found an international television business to push environmental and human rights issues into the media mainstream.
These days, he's hoping to convince Nelson people to fit solar water heating panels to their roofs. If it sounds like a comedown, to Mr Booth it is ultimately about the same ends: doing something real about saving the planet.
And don't underestimate the end goal. The young company Mr Booth is at the head of, Solar City, may be immediately focused on a scheme to get Nelson building owners to install solar water heating, but the picture is much bigger than that. If climate change is the biggest environmental challenge facing the world, then Solar City intends to be "right at the heart of the debate about climate change in Nelson and New Zealand", Mr Booth says.
Hence this week's report produced by the Cawthron Institute, commissioned by Solar City, to apply the latest science on climate change to Nelson and draw some practical conclusions about what could be in store. They include the prediction that, depending on the rate of sea level rise caused by melting ice caps, much of the city's heart as we know it will vanish into Tasman Bay - airports, ports, supermarkets, beaches, business infrastructure, houses.
But given its long-term view - 100 years or so - and what looks like a fairly gloomy worst-case approach, was the report really intended to be anything more than a button- pushing exercise - a bit of a stunt to publicise a cause, even?
Mr Booth doesn't go with the scepticism. "I think it's really difficult for people to appreciate . . . what climate change might actually mean. What Cawthron have done is find some everyday reference points so that people can actually appreciate what it might mean for a city like Nelson. And, sure, it's all theory at the moment, it's all what scientists think might happen."
But what strikes him about the climate change debate is that it is being largely led by the scientists, and "science is driving the politicians to act". More than that, he says, the real impetus for change won't come from politicians, with their focus on the election cycle, but from "ordinary people, with children and grandchildren", who take the longer view about their legacy.
"Rather than leave people with that feeling that all these nasty things are happening, people do want to get involved."
He freely admits that the firebrand approach to environmental activism - the stance he adopted when he first threw himself into the movement as a teenager some 30 years ago - is really the stuff of youth. It was images of the big seal culls in Canada that first caught his attention and stoked his outrage. He studied zoology at university, and from there volunteered for Greenpeace. His qualification saw him quickly become involved in campaigning, as well as the more mundane tasks expected of volunteers - packing T-shirts and the like. "Much of my 20s was spent all around different parts of Europe and the world, campaigning on a variety of issues."
Today, Greenpeace is often accused of staging stunts for the television cameras. Mr Booth is unapologetic that capturing media and political attention was the motive, but "these weren't designed as stunts"; the aim was always to make the public and the decision makers recognise "how urgently we as young people felt and how concerned we were about some of the issues".
The risks those young people took were high, too - his closest call was nearly ending up in the propellers of a ship he had tied himself to during a blockade of the Dutch port of Rotterdam.
By his late 20s, he was in charge of Greenpeace campaigns for Britain, and from there he was elected to Greenpeace's five-person international board. He remains a supporter, but recognised long ago that Greenpeace relies on making way for the next generation.
"As you get older, I don't think you share the same passion about trying to move things forward for your next generation. I think you run out of steam to a certain extent. and you also need fresh ideas. It really is, from my perspective, an organisation that needs to be out there challenging the status quo, and I think you need the younger person's perspective."
With age comes savviness - in his case, after 15 years with Greenpeace, a growing recognition of the way the levers of power operate, particularly those controlled by the news media.
His theory was and is that the world's news diet is essentially controlled by a duopoly - the two giant news agencies of Reuters and Associated Press (AP), which feed news reports to a mass of subscribers around the world, including all the major news companies.
Frustrated that the news machine had a narrow focus with little room for stories about the environment or human rights, Mr Booth and a colleague, Peter Sibley, came up with a plan: they created their own television production company, World Television, to specialise in professionally made news reports about such issues, partnering with one of the big players to feed those stories into the agency's subscriber services. Reuters took them on, and World Television thrived. It has long since outgrown its original remit and listed on the sharemarket.
His involvement now is limited to a directorship, but he remains a close student of the fast-changing forces affecting the media landscape. "What's interesting is that the news media largely . . . mediate the relationship - the economic relationship - between nations."
But since moving to New Zealand and Nelson eight years ago with his Kiwi wife Lorraine and their four children, he has sought to change down. "I've tried to move as far as I can towards living a simpler life."
He acknowledges the contradictions between "the purity of vision" he had in his youth and the business world he has been immersed in since; they are, he muses, all part of the compromises and complications that are the reality of getting on in life. But he maintains that he holds true to that vision of his youth, even if it is expressed in a more modest, less confrontational way - the vision of solar panels on rooftops the length and breadth of the country, one that he is working towards with fellow investors Barry Leay and Simon Stockdale.
Solar City is still in its early days but has already acquired a couple of other companies (a Christchurch manufacturer of solar hot water panels, an Auckland firm that sources world-leading solar electrical technology). It is also monitoring the progress of technology that will allow homeowners to use the sun's rays to generate electricity, both for household use and to sell back into the electricity grid.
Besides being central to the climate change debate, he wants it to emerge as a "world-class solar business".
"No-one's really grasping the fact that the New Zealand solar resource is 20 to 30 times better than anywhere else. Being able to use that sort of resource just seems a no- brainer, " he says.
"We see a huge opportunity to create quite a big industry here, providing clean jobs at a time when everybody's going to be looking for alternative energy sources and trying to decarbonise economy.
"A city that grabs the opportunity it has and becomes a leader in clean energy technologies will be a leader in the economy that comes out of the climate change debate. And I think Nelson has that opportunity."