All company bosses want a policy on corporate social responsibility. The positive effect is hard to quantify, but the negative consequences of a disaster are enormous.

Without industry, finance and government consciously and collaboratively ensuring that capital flows to where it is needed in order to ensure the scaling up of climate change solutions, whatever deal is agreed risks never being realised.

With clothing being designed that allows you to be hugged virtually, video conferencing becoming ever sharper, and our social and romantic lives increasingly taking place online, the gap between the physical and the virtual is getting ever smaller.

The problem lies with us: we've become addicted to experts. We've become addicted to their certainty, their assuredness, their definitiveness, and in the process, we have ceded our responsibility, substituting our intellect and our intelligence for their supposed words of wisdom.

Transparency, accountability and sustainability have become the slogans of the market leaders. Companies carry out environmental and social audits to court the consumer, and even the bluest chips woo organisations such as Greenpeace and Amnesty.

It is a world of extremes, which can be characterised most clearly in terms of exclusion. That means political exclusion, whereby the rights of citizens are marginalised by the interests of big business: George W Bush's environmental policy, for example, is clearly formulated in the interests of U.S. energy companies.