A word in your ear Henry…

Unusually, Georgie my daughter has been quietly reading. It's a tranquil scene, until the calm is broken by her loud guffaws. Apparently Mr Pickwick has just encountered lawyers. Charles Dickens does not seem much impressed by them.

On the wall above Georgie there's a photo of another Victorian. He is a respectable be-whiskered old gent, who, like many active working people of that time, looks well past retirement age. Henry Lea founded my firm in 1862. He brought electric lighting to the UK and did early work on air conditioning hospitals (see BSJ passim). I wondered what Dickens would have made of him? Probably a lot more than he did lawyers.

That was 150 years ago. Since then the legal profession has moved to the top of the food-chain, and engineers are well down in the professional middle ranks. There have of course been respectable lawyers: Abe Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, and a score of prime ministers. However, their high professional standing comes largely from having enmeshed themselves as important cogs in the commercial machine.

Sublime to ridiculous
My reading was a bit dustier than Charles Dickens – an analysis of EU Directive 91-2002 by a reputable law firm. The directive, on energy performance in buildings, aims to cut energy use and CO₂ emissions in buildings. Spontaneously, and in perfect sync with Georgie, I too started laughing. The legal conclusion was that the directive would not be too onerous, provided we found someone else to carry the burden of our new liabilities.

It was mirthless laughter. What an utter waste; entirely missing the directive's whole meaning and likely outcomes. The advice was all about resisting change. It was exactly the sort of counsel that Canute must have regretted taking when he was up to his neck in salt water. If the UK is to make an asset out of climate change, a more valuable analysis would have set out where the directive will lead and the opportunities that go with it.

The directive is a clever document because it is targeted at internal market-driven reform of the property industry’s environmental behaviour

The directive is a clever document because, whilst it's a regulatory initiative, it is part of a raft of initiatives targeted more fundamentally at internal, market-driven reform of the property industry's environmental behaviour. It requires owners to disclose the energy and carbon performance of their property portfolio for the scrutiny of shareholders, prospective tenants and purchasers. Ultimately they must expose themselves to accurate league-tabling by agencies and NGOs.

Avoiding the inevitable
A lot of property companies will need to rethink their published environmental policies. Many are sewn with expressions of "environmental best practices" here and "lowest environmental impacts" there. The system of measurement initiated by the directive will show such statements to be mostly untrue.

While the lawyers scuttle around looking for substitute phrases and 'clever' avoidance strategies to justify their hourly fees, the business of communicating the opportunities inherent in implementing the change will fall to the construction industry. In short order, much will come to rest with those members of the team who read BSJ.

I hope we are up to the job, because we should not underestimate the importance of the sustainability agenda or of the task we face in moving to a carbon-free energy future. The impacts of greenhouse gas emissions threaten mankind itself. Signs are that the 'experiment' of burning fossil fuels is destined to harm our kids' future, even if we cut our excesses now.