Eco-Aviation Channel

ANZ CEO Rob Fyfe takes off gloves to fight environmental inertia

By Geoffrey Thomas
Eco-Aviation Today, October 12, 2009, p.2

In one of the hardest-hitting speeches in recent times, Air New Zealand CEO Rob Fyfe lashed out at the "inconvenient truth" that the world's leaders, regulators and airlines are continuing to "invest enormous resources the world over in debating climate change regulatory frameworks and yet failing to take even the most basic steps to actually reduce emissions."

Speaking at the Greener Skies conference in Hong Kong organized by Orient Aviation magazine last week, Fyfe said that these "policy discussions and the hand-wringing over agreeing to emission reduction targets are interminable and they are distracting us from the far more important focus of taking action. This is simply a travesty. To my mind, the UN climate change discussions amplify all that is wrong with global politics. Whether under the Framework Convention on Climate Change, ICAO or elsewhere--it's the same procrastination; multiple conferences of many thousands; turgid presentations and inequitable albeit politically acceptable backroom deals determining the shape of unwieldy global agreements at a glacial pace."

It is high time, he emphasized, to move beyond the talking and take action: "I am very happy to see a price on carbon--it should be applied equitably across geographies; uniformly across all industry sectors; and it should incentivize improvement and investment in new green technologies rather than simply penalize all activity. I look forward to the day when we all stop protecting our respective butts in the endless policy debates and start focusing, globally, on concerted action. Just imagine what we could achieve if a tenth of the global bank bailout funds from the past 12 months were directed towards the environment instead." He also lashed out at governments for their "money grabbing" behavior over emissions taxes.

Fyfe said that at ANZ the executive team spends only a small fraction of its time on the interminable climate change policy debates and instead invests efforts into actions that are making material differences in terms of the environment (see item below). He has challenged his team to position ANZ as the "most environmentally responsible airline on the planet." He claimed that the carrier has achieved a 10% improvement in fuel intensity since 1995 and expects a 15% improvement in the next 10 years. "I challenge other airlines and industries to come up with like or better intensity improvements."

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