Dagenham ducks the global warming challenge

Marconi battle, Loaded Â

Ford has seen the future and, as far as Dagenham at least is concerned, it is diesel. In three years time, Fiesta production will be a distant memory and Dagenham will instead be pumping out nearly 1 million diesel engines.

By 2005, Ford reckons half the cars in Europe and a third of those on Britain's roads will be diesel-powered, and since diesel engines produce 20 per cent less carbon dioxide than the petrol variety, this will contribute to a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

In the week when 1,057 scientists showed US President George Bush just how wrong he is about global warming, America's second biggest car maker is at least doing its bit to fight the good fight. But Ford, along with the rest of the motor industry, knows that no matter how popular the diesel engine becomes it will never enable the industrialised world to meet its Kyoto targets.

In fact, no one knows it better than Bill Ford, the grandson of Henry, president of Ford and, unusually for a petrol-head, also a renowned environmentalist. He has predicted the death of the internal combustion engine within the next generation.

But his company will have its work cut out to make the prediction come true. The best hope lies in the development of a commercially viable fuel cell engine, which runs on hydrogen and produces zero emissions.

But a long road lies ahead. First the fuel cell has to be made affordable. Then it has to be miniaturised so it does not take up half the boot. Then there needs to be a national distribution system – the oil companies' petrol station chains being the most obvious network.

No-one can object to the lifeline that Ford has thrown Dagenham when car production ends there next year, nor the $500m it is investing and the 500 jobs it will create. But this is not a long-term solution. Rather than turning Britain into its world centre for engine production, how much more exciting it would have been if Ford had made it the centre for fuel cell technology.

The lads at Loaded magazine would know how to spend AOL Time Warner's £1.2bn and if their publishing company fetches anything like that then David Arculus ought not to believe his luck.

The chairman of IPC Media had initially planned to float the business but three years on from the buyout from Reed Elsevier, the equity market is about as flat as the publishing market is tough.

So a bunch of Americans looking for a beachhead in Europe, could not have come along at a better time.

For Cinven, the venture capital group that backed the £920m buyout, cashing out with a small profit and honour intact, would represent a good result. The magazine market, by most reckoning, is close to bottoming and IPC, squeezed by intense competition and flat margins, has proven a tougher proposition than expected.

For AOL Time Warner, the deal is a step towards generating half its sales from outside the US, something that won't happen through organic growth. Regulatory restrictions on non-European companies owning broadcasting assets mean the media giant must feed on magazine publishers and cable networks.

Taking IPC under its wing would make the US group the biggest UK magazine publisher, but may also sound the gun on a series of cross-border European media deals targeting, perhaps, Italy's Mondadori or Lagardère of France.

Steve Case, AOL's chairman, is deploying resources to build scale at a time when most other groups are preoccupied with survival – witness Telewest which looked at IPC last year as a vehicle for delivering millions of readers to new media products but decided the core business needed its undivided attention.

There may also be prospects for developing some of IPC's strongest publishing franchises into television programmes to fill the void created by the explosion of digital channels through cable and satellite. Sadly, none of the UK groups possess AOL Time Warner's ambition or resources and they can only dream of having the scale of operation and cost of capital that Mr Case benefits from.

UK magazine groups may be unrivalled in their creative talent but with the likes of AOL Time Warner on the prowl they are doomed to be but tasty appetisers on a far broader menu.

The plot thickens. There are now names against two of the three candidates Lord Weinstock is lining up to take over as chief executive of Marconi from Lord Simpson of Dunkeld. Unfortunately, no sooner had the shortlist been drawn up than one of them, the former Energis boss Mike Grabiner, withdrew from it. As for the remaining two, the identity of one is a mystery while the other, the ex-Marconi man Peter Gershon, has not yet been approached. Mr Gershon is not yet half way through his three-year stint as Whitehall cost-buster at the Office of Government Commerce. But he is only 54 and may want a break from saving paper clips and light bulbs on behalf of the taxpayer.

All this makes two very large presumptions, of course. First, that Lord Simpson's job is up for grabs, at all. And second, that Lord Weinstock has the mandate to go hunting for a successor. The membership of Marconi's nominations committee is there for any shareholder to see on page 32 of the annual report and Lord Weinstock's name is conspicuous by its absence. The Marconi camp is resolute in insisting that Lord Simpson will remain as chief executive and frankly bemused that someone with no legal authority or connection to the board should be attempting to manipulate its composition from his sick bed.

That said, Lord Weinstock has hit three of his four targets so far with the removal of John Mayo, the scrapping of the options rebasing plan and the failure of Lord Simpson to assume the chairmanship. His next goal is to soften up the board by unseating a couple of the non-execs at Wedesday's AGM. Lord Weinstock will not be ringside himself which is a shame since they could have sold the tickets 10 times over.

m.harrison@independent.co.uk