Swiss greens and blues in perfect harmony

CHRIS WALKER

A battle-scarred eco-warrior once told me that the city of New York consumed more energy during rush hour than the entire African continent. I never believed her, until the day of the "Great Gridlock" in Manhattan.

A battle-scarred eco-warrior once told me that the city of New York consumed more energy during rush hour than the entire African continent. I never believed her, until the day of the "Great Gridlock" in Manhattan.

The President had come to town, and since he'd already taken one bullet in the shoulder, his security team cordoned off 10 blocks to keep him safe. The island froze - nothing could move. For seven hours, drivers choked on their fumes, until the police brought in cranes to free the crossways.

Late that evening, in the Gold Bar, a Wall Street trader who'd been drinking since lunchtime grabbed my lapels and asked: "What the hell are politicians coming to New York for, anyway? This is a business city - they should stay in Washington."

The mixture of business, politics and the environment is a lethal cocktail.The BP AGM has become a set-piece pitched battle between "the Greens" and "the Capitalists". Oil companies are the easiest targets for the environmentalists. They are multinational by their nature, and the commodity they deal in is ripped from some of the most beautiful corners of the earth, then converted by an awesome alchemy into the belching fumes of the New York rush hour.

The last AGM saw a stinging attack on the company's activities in Alaska, with a campaigner itemising the alleged destruction of the local environment. What struck me, however, was an equally eloquent riposte from the floor. One Middle Eastern shareholder, while regretting anything that may have happened in Alaska, attacked the choice of easy "corporate" targets. He pointed out that politicians are responsible for far worse environmental crimes. Alaska was nothing, for example, when compared to the destruction of the vast conservation area of the Tigris and Euphrates deltas ordered by Saddam Hussein.

Corporate targets are chosen by environmentalists precisely because they can be subject to pressure in a way in which governments cannot. Many of the protesters in Seattle made the mistake of thinking of great corporations as necessarily evil, and Third World governments as necessarily good. But it isn't that simple. The Greens, in my opinion, rather than attacking capitalism head-on, should seek to harness it as a force for good.

The worst pollution I have ever seen was in East Germany, in consequence of central planning. Just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a group of investors visited a large chemical works, run by the party boss, which had done untold damage. The locals referred to the surrounding lakes as the blue one, the red one and the orange one.

We moved on to Ruddersdorf, the largest cement works in Eastern Europe. The core of the machinery had been installed as part of the final war effort and had not been touched since 1944. You can imagine the pollution - the village was a white ghost town, its inhabitants cursed with scarred lungs.

It was left to a FT-SE construction company to clean up the damage wrought by 40 years of state planning. In this case, capitalism was a force for good.

Can it happen the other way round? Is it possible for political moves on the environment to help business? Perhaps we have an opportunity closer to home.

I think Londoners woke up to the environment when Big Ben changed colour. I'd always assumed it was black, and it was quite a shock when it scrubbed up white. If that's what the traffic did to buildings, what was it doing to the people?

Pessimists claim the traffic problem is nothing new - the traffic speed in central London has famously remained a constant 4mph since the 1890s. But I have to say that it is a justifiable question whether our creaking infrastructure and polluted air are making London a less attractive place to do business. "London isn't working"?

This is why we should be interested in the transport debate that is coming to dominate the final stages of the London election. This may be an area where the politicians could force environmental change and help business. There are some dramatic proposals being discussed. The radical Peter Tatchell has talked of car-free Sundays in the West End, backed up by a halving of tube fares. Maybe it has got to the stage where we need a touch of radicalism.

I'd choked too much in too many cities lately, so I decided to clamber up the Matterhorn for Easter. The contrast to Manhattan could not be greater. The handful of cars permitted in the tiny Swiss village were all electric. We were politely asked not to use too many bath towels (to save on detergent use), and even the toilet paper was recycled. It is hard to imagine a society more capitalist than Switzerland, nor one that sits more happily in its place on this planet.

* Chris Walker is a director of Hill Samuel. Contact: Christopher. walker@hsam.co.uk