Slow and steady...doesn't always win the race

Humans currently live on the North side of the Earth's sustainable limits, running up a growing debt with the environment. Our approaches to fighting climate change apparently fail to account for the growth of this debt.

You might have missed news about the recent Global Roundtable on Climate Change, which brought together prominent business leaders to summarize the view of big business on the issue.

The last big business story about climate change was Chrysler's chief economist Van Jolissaint opining, at the January Detroit Motor Show, that it was all in the imagination of 'quasi-hysterical Europeans'.

The story of the Global Roundtable makes better reading. After much deliberation, the Roundtable published its views in a document called The Path to Climate Sustainability. It describes a course of action to curb global resource use and waste production to within sustainable limits.

An exclusive club, its members boast great confidence in the endeavor. Quotably, General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt says that 'global businesses are assuming their just place as catalysts for action on climate change', and that political leaders are "lagging behind".

Immelt is right to highlight the problem of lagging behind.

Lags are a no-no when it comes to moving along a path to sustainable limits. Why? Because if you lag behind long enough, the sustainable limits will themselves change substantially, and move further away from your well intentioned path.

The basic idea is simple: if you lag behind in your debt payments, debt grows larger, forcing up the cost of repayments. The longer we spend sitting around planning the path to sustainability, the less likely we'll reach the goal.