Juliet Davenport's Reading List

"I met Ian McEwan as part of the Cape Farewell programme. That is an organisation set up by a lovely man called David Buckland, who is a photographer and an artist. He wanted to create a social response to climate change. In other words, he wanted to get people like Ian McEwan to mix with the scientists and find out more about what is going on. So he took a lot of people – including Ian McEwan, Philip Pullman and Jarvis Cocker – to the North Pole along with some scientists, so they could see what was going on for themselves. Ian took what he saw and put it in a novel. He wanted to put some big scientific ideas into everyday language. So much of our world revolves around creative media. We watch television, we watch films and it is very much part of our society. David Buckland wanted to make climate change part of that dialogue. A lot of people find it very difficult to write about climate change because it is not something that lends itself to comic effect, and it is not something that people often want to write about, but Ian managed to. I thought it was very funny. It was an interesting take on the perceptions of some of the big issues between society and scientists, and the fact that we as a society don’t really understand what scientists are doing. Scientists are these objects that go around winning Nobel prizes, but actually not many of us really appreciate that they are human beings as well. In Ian’s book you have the physicist Michael Beard, who was brilliant once, won a Nobel prize earlier in his career and has been cruising ever since. Quite often a scientist makes a brilliant discovery and then you become part of a government and funding system where you stop being a scientist. It is a little bit like teachers, who when they progress get further and further away from the classroom. The novel starts when Michael Beard has lost his scientific thread, and there is this rather bizarre death at the beginning when someone falls over and kills himself in his house. Then he steals a science idea from the dead man, and the rest of the book is an unravelling of the personality of the professor and this solar technology idea that he has stolen. Part of the book is set in the Arctic, where Ian went with Cape Farewell. It all has Ian McEwan’s humour."

"I read this book on holiday and found it interesting, because I hadn’t really thought about the history of the corporation. It goes right back to the South Sea Bubble, where early investors were very unprotected. Then there was a lot of legislation put in place to protect shareholders and to make sure their interests were always looked after. As a result you ended up with corporations where the corporate structure is really only there to protect the shareholder and doesn’t take anything else into account. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . What struck me is the comparison with how society is governed. For example, if you live in a Christian society the Ten Commandments are mirrored in legislation – Thou Shall Not Kill, Thou Shall Not Steal – but those kinds of societal norms are not reflected through the corporate structure. It is interesting because, as a relatively strong chief executive, when I present my ideas to shareholders I always talk about the mission of the company and what we are here to do, but that isn’t enshrined in the legislation of my company. It is not naturally enshrined in any business that they are there to have a purpose, and I think it is a really interesting concept for us whether businesses should be responsible – for example in their impact on the environment . It does, but it is not part of your responsibility as a company. We have corporate social responsibility as a concept, but one that is too woolly. What I found fascinating about the book is that there are people who go to work every day and do things in their jobs – because of shareholder returns and because they are doing it for the company – that they would never consider doing in their private lives. I think there is space for a new, moral value-system to be put in place for corporations. And the general populace, who are having to bail out banking systems, definitely feel that representation of the people or some representation of the environment should be a key part of that."

"The best thing about David’s book is that it simplifies all the issues. So many people in the energy market make it really complicated, so that no one can really understand it. What David did was to take it down to some simple numbers across the board in terms of how much energy people use in their homes, how much energy people use in their cars, what we use as a society, and what that is going to look like in the next five, 10 or 20 years. If we want to provide power from alternative sources, where can that come from? What are the resources at the moment in the UK and what are the possibilities? This is a fantastic piece of work to start people thinking about this in a wider debate, rather than just amongst scientists and energy specialists. He broadened it out to lots of people who might find this kind of information difficult to collate themselves. He came up with six or seven possible outcomes of what you could do. He now works at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, and they have created a pathway so you can create your own model of the future based on the work that he did in the book. We’ve done that at Good Energy, looking at what you would need to do and what technologies you would need to introduce to make the UK 100% [renewable] by 2050. It involves changes to UK energy at every stage of the process, from grid management to investment, and from research and development to transport. The answer will be increased electrification of all our networks, in turn pushing electricity demand to at least double current levels. Meeting that increased demand from renewable sources will be more than a goal, it’ll be a necessity."

"I wanted to read this book because I didn’t really understand how the global economy managed to get into the current mess. Suddenly the banking system was collapsing and everyone was talking about sub-prime mortgages. And it was fascinating to read this story of greed, egos and disregard for process. There were all these stops and checks to stop things like this happening but the key players had dismissed them all, which was amazing. It was so arrogant. One of the things that is really important to any business is that you need to get money from somewhere to do it. The insight I got was that the money markets seem to be happy to implement some very high-risk strategies if they think they can make huge amounts of money – and they did on paper for many years. And actually we need huge amounts of money to be able to deliver the renewable targets that we are talking about. So it got me thinking, what are the issues within banking, who do they talk about, what do they think and might they be interested in us as a market? It was partly that, but it is also about how we frame renewable energy in a way that can be an alternative to the sub-prime market. I am not suggesting that anybody would want to repeat the risks that were taken there, but obviously people were happy to take a certain amount of risk. What we need to do is to persuade bankers that renewables isn’t a high-risk strategy, and it was interesting reading the book to see what the methods for doing that were. Definitely. Renewable energy is fascinating because it is a very long-term asset. At the moment pension funds can either buy property, which isn’t doing very well right now, or invest in equities, which isn’t a very good bet either. So I think that maybe they should be investing in renewable energy projects, which will happen in the future out of necessity."

"I know it sounds rather odd, but it does. I went to the Hay Festival and I heard Bettany Hughes speak on this and then I read her book. It is very detailed about Socrates’s life and where he grew up, and is a very practical book in that it discusses the world around him rather than his philosophy. The nub of the book is all around his death with the hemlock cup and his criticism of the emerging democracy of the day. Socrates basically was saying he wasn’t sure that the democracy that they were trying to sell to us was really the way forward. What was really interesting about it was that he wasn’t worried so much about democracy itself but about the way they were doing it. They were creating huge amounts of wealth in a single place and forcing everyone to become a democracy. It made me think that maybe Socrates was one of the first environmentalists when he began to see that greed wasn’t the best way forward. Although it was sold under the guise of a democracy, using up lots of resources and gathering lots of wealth from different places wasn’t actually making Athenians any happier. And they ended up putting up huge walls to protect themselves and prevent other people from coming to steal back their wealth. It really is interesting to go back in time and look at alternative societies and democracies and where they succeeded and failed. Yes. I know it is not as direct as my other choices but it is important to me. We talk about growth but what we don’t talk about is the shrinking of the environment that we use to increase that growth. Our use of high-carbon energy is the main problem. The downturn has had the welcome effect – if you can put it like that – of reducing the total amount of energy we are using, but we continue to use a lot of fossil fuel-based energy. People go around saying lots of small actions don’t make a difference, but actually they do. Many of us are beginning to feel the pinch when it comes to petrol but we still manage to make a lot of trips. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Another important area is our homes. We all want to be warm and have light and many of us want to watch TV. All of those things use energy. One way to help with that is, first of all, to understand just how much energy we are using. Everyone can get a hand-held meter, connect it in your home and begin to see how much energy you use. Insulation is another key area. We have quite a lot of windows in our home. I have just put double-glazing in two of them and I am going to slowly save up and work through the whole house, because it makes a huge difference. You don’t have to do it all at once but you can do it slowly over time. Put curtains over doors to reduce draughts and look at the insulation in your roof. Most people don’t have enough insulation in their roof. Even if you already put one layer down, you should actually put two or even three layers down. These are very simple things you can do. It takes time and money, but all of those things will in the long term save people money and improve their impact on the environment."