Jerry G: The climate change ambassador for Ireland for the last year, Leslie Butler, has been great. She's delivered a programme that works with SMEs to help reduce their environmental impacts.

It starts with an assessment of how things are and then coming up with a plan for how to make changes.

ST: Like a green audit?

JG: That might be too formal a term for it. We're looking at your processes. What's so great about it is that often small and medium businesses don't have the resources to do something like that. They have the motivation and desire to do it, but having a small business you're kind of busy just keeping up with stuff, so a lot of times you're dealing with the crisis of the day and it's harder to plan.

Providing a service like this is incredibly valuable.

ST: What's the business case for incorporating the ideas being put out by the climate change ambassador programme?

JG: The primary case is that it helps your bottom line. Typically if you have problems with your energy usage or efficiency, that means you have waste in your business.

When you fix your environmental impacts, you end up saving money. From my experience, people feel better if their businesses are doing good things . . . they're more motivated and they perform better.

My experience with Ben & Jerry's has been that the more caring and environmentallyinterested the business has been, the more profitable the business has been. It's not a case of those things detracting from each other.

ST: Other companies have picked up on that. Google's "don't be evil" model is another example. Sometimes the marketplace gets in the way, though. You have an ethical ideal and then the practicalities of running a business.

JG: The kinds of things that we've run into are not values conflicts. In the US until recently we manufactured all our ice cream using Vermont milk and cream from family farmers. We wanted to support them . . . plus it was great quality stuff. The other side of that is we ended up shipping a lot of ice cream all across the country, using a lot of fuel.

We recently decided to move some manufacturing out to the west coast. It was a real dilemma. We still use family farms, but in Vermont a family farm is about 100 cows, in the west it's a lot bigger.

So on the one hand we saved all this energy and it's much better environmentally, on the other hand we didn't have the same commitment to Vermont farmers.

ST: That sounds like a reasonable trade-off.

JG: We could have continued to manufacture in Vermont.

In the US Ben & Jerry's is very affiliated with Vermont, we're seen as a Vermont business. From a marketing perspective it's of less value. We can't say we make all our ice cream in Vermont anymore.

It was choosing between two right things, neither of which was the right answer.

ST: Capitalism is like that, isn't it?

JG: Ah. Nothing's perfect.

ST: It's not zero-sum, it's not a matter of taking from one to develop another . . . would you agree?

JG: Yes. It's additive. The more good things you do the better you do. It's because life is not a zero-sum game. As you give you receive, as you help others, you're helped in return.

ST: Let's apply that additive concept of capitalism to the climate change issue. Businesses are afraid doing something is going to cost them something. How far are you from resolving that argument?

JG: You kind of skipped over the part where if we don't make changes, we're going to destroy the planet as we know it. If you accept that part there's no argument at all. Let's say you acknowledge that the current path we're on is unsustainable and if we don't make changes we will start to see environmental impacts that change the world as we know it. We don't know if it will lead to floods and destruction . . . we don't really know. If you believe that, there's no choice about making a change . . . unless you want to roll the dice and say we'll take our chances.

This is not about business people, it's about humans.

Humans find it hard to change unless there's a crisis.

It's not until things are really bad, and then it might be too late.

ST: The other way of looking at it is that there could be opportunities in the crisis.

JG: Part of the problem with the calculation with the equation as it is now, is that the costs involved with the depletion of resources and pollution are not costs that businesses bear. Those costs are externalised to the rest of society.

So things are artificially cheap for businesses. We're talking about businesses bearing the expense for the impacts they have, but businesses don't want to do that.

ST: Well, they'll pass the costs on to us, won't they?

JG: Eventually. I'm a believer in regulation, which is not a standard business point of view. Business wants to let the free market decide. . . up until now business hasn't shown that it's willing to take the initiative. If business won't do it, the government has to take action. Because the role of government is to act in the common good. Business has never had that as part of its role. It's unrealistic to expect business to start acting for the common good. Business acts in its self-interest. That's the nature of business . . . to maximise profit without regard for its impacts. It just externalises all those costs.

ST: Let me ask you about your own business then. Why are you still making ice cream? It's energy intensive, it's processed, you have to raise cows, transport the product.

JG: For us the trick is how do make what you're doing climate neutral. You can either say we're not going to do it anymore or we're going to figure out a way to do it that is climate neutral. We decided to look at all the processes we're involved in from feeding cows, to freezing ice cream, to transport . . . so it begins with looking at cows and the methane they produce and are there other foods we can feed them to reduce it, to freezer efficiency.

ST: Doesn't winter get cold enough in Vermont to just freeze it outside?

JG: We used to joke about that, but it's just not consistent enough.

The idea of being climate neutral is once you make those changes, you make a commitment to offset all the other impacts you make.

ST: Does it take the focus off your primary business?

JG: I think it is our primary business. It's all linked. You can't separate how you do things and what your beliefs are.