This was one of the conclusions from a debate hosted this week on the Guardian Sustainable Business website between business leaders from across the world under the auspices of the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP).
Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, warned that efficiency gains alone would not succeed in reaching the quantum leap needed to address climate change and that companies needed to band together to offer an "orchestrated and compelling" case to policy makers to counter the power of the energy intensive industry.
She said: "There is a serious group of companies that have a voice that is much louder, that is better funded, that operates much more in unison and that is still stuck in the technologies and the fuels of yesterday.
"So if we don't have a voice that is equally as orchestrated with arguments that are at least equally as compelling, then governments are going to be taking very timid decisions and they're not going to be tipping the scale."
This view was echoed by Johannes Meier, the chief executive of the European Climate Foundation, who said politicians were looking for a clear signal to act and that new partnerships between business, NGOs and consumer groups needed to be created to challenge the energy intensive companies.
"Policy makers and politicians very much like a clear signal," he said. "I think those opposing the transformation towards a low carbon economy have been exceptionally good at creating noise, creating doubt on the value of science and producing as their product basically doubt. I think that the challenge we have as a group and beyond business is to change the signal to noise ratio." Read the full report here.
Source: Jo Confino, guardian.co.uk.
