Dow Chemical leads way as climate talks go corporate

The Life: Russel Mills plane-hops from Copenhagen to Durban to Doha, representing a major industrial power at the United Nations climate negotiations.

Russel Mills, Dow Chemical's chief climate envoy, spent 30 years developing the company's commercial operations. Geert Vanden Wijngaert for The National

Russel Mills plane-hops from Copenhagen to Durban to Doha, representing a major industrial power at the United Nations climate negotiations.

In Dubai recently for meetings with the office of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Vice President of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, Mr Mills pushed for cooperation in innovation and regulatory expertise — not on behalf of his nation, but Dow Chemical, the American company that makes fertiliser, plastics and raw materials such as chlorine.

The global warming debate, once the exclusive domain of governments and green non-governmental organisations (NGOs), has gone corporate.

Oil majors and other industrial giants have stepped up their game, knowing that any caps on emissions will hit their bottom line.

Ipieca, an energy industry organisation based in London made up of such companies with climate change teams, has watched its membership numbers double from 22 in 1974 to 51 today.

Dow Chemical, which has invested in a US$20 billion (Dh73.45bn) petrochemical joint venture with Saudi Aramco and operates plants around the world, relies on hydrocarbons both as the raw material to craft polymers and as a fuel to drive its plants.

"Fossil fuels are going to be used for a long time," says Mr Mills, Dow's director for energy and climate change policy.

"So let's be transparent and open about this - let's not pretend that magically things are going to disappear. This is not about stopping fossil fuel use. It's not even about at this point reducing fossil fuel use, because it's clear they're going to continue growing. This is about smarter use of fossil fuels."

Companies walking the green line often cite the economic benefit of reducing their reliance on oil and gas. Dow Chemical's reference case is a $1 billion investment begun in 1994 to promote energy saving with the hope of breaking even. Instead, taking into account the rising cost of energy, Dow says it has reaped a total return of $25bn.

"We wouldn't be here today if we hadn't started that," Mr Mills says.

After Oxford University, Dow's chief climate envoy spent the next three decades working on the company's commercial and business development side - putting the pieces in place for multibillion-dollar plants.

Then he was seconded for several years to an industry association in Brussels - a crash course in the political milieu of energy policy. The European Union launched its emissions trading system and the United States flirted with the idea of its own cap-and-trade regime.

"It needed a combination of technical understanding because some of this stuff gets quite technical, but some of the stuff is quite high level, generic, societal-driven," Mr Mills says. "It was good to have enough of an understanding from the Dow capability standpoint, but also understanding of how politicians speak compared to how businesspeople speak - because we speak a different language.

"Any businessperson who goes to a UN climate meeting for the first time, they don't even understand what's being said because we all use different acronyms, and we say things in different ways," Mr Mills says. "You have to have people to speak the same language so at least you can guide the conversation."

The conversation can be difficult at negotiations where 194 nations - along with companies like Dow and environmental NGOs offering their input on the sidelines - are trying to agree on a universal plan for the planet.

"It's a slow and quite painful process and I think what we always find difficult from a business perspective is in business when you have a process and the process is not working, you stop the process and try and develop a different process," Mr Mills says.

"When you look at the UN climate process, a lot of the thinking is 30 years out of date. People spend forever talking about the past.

"We're never going to solve a problem which is really going to impact much more seriously long-term in the future in 2050 or whatever unless we start looking to the future."