Corporate Sustainability

Guy explains how companies can save the world, using squirrels, floods, hair, solar power, intern safety and wildfires.

Transcript

Welcome to the one-hundred-and-eighteenth episode of The Undercover Intern podcast, coming to you live from the centre of London Luton Airport. I'm your host, Guy Snapdragon, and today is Monday the 5th of May 2025.

We are sponsored this week by The Maywentery Golf Course. Welcoming men of all abilities since 1923. Ernie Els and Vijay Singh will be playing a round at Maywentery this evening and there will then be a live Q&A session for male members. All proceeds will go towards grass feed and fertilizer.

If lines of communication were open, we’d have had a huge response to episode 115 which was my literal call to arms to save nature. For that reason, it is a subject to which we return today.

Grey squirrels - the pigeons of the trees, with tails - are not as powerful as man. They might have single-pawedly eradicated red squirrels from most of the United Kingdom, but they are merely animals and are not capable of evil. I say this in response to rumours of grey squirrels evolving in and around the golf courses of South-east England to the point that they maliciously pick up golf balls and bury them in the ground as they would a prized nut. It makes sense that golf-course-dwelling squirrels would prefer to live in peace, and you have to remember that to them a golf ball is the equivalent of a concrete melon, and clearly a ball driven 300-yards directly to the squirrel head would result in immediate death. I must also admit that I speculated back in episode 112 about the possibility of grey squirrels moving Garry Rafferty’s beheaded head from hole 7 to hole 16. If they can carry a severed human head for a mile, they can surely move a golf ball a few yards? And they do have highly dexterous paws including a thumb-like digit. But I think we are all giving grey squirrels too much credit and I see no video evidence; surely there would be clips of large grey squirrels all over Twitter moving golf balls. By this, I don’t mean that the grey squirrels are recording themselves and posting their own videos; nobody is claiming this, so far as I know. I mean that some human would have filmed the squirrels in action. My suspicion, and I use the Occam’s Razor principle here, is that it’s just bad golfers latching on to a convenient excuse for their errant shots. I do mostly believe in evolution, but I do not believe in golfball-hiding giant grey squirrels.  

That is an example of sustainability - of humans needing to live in harmony with the native golf course alongside the animals who also call the native golf course home. Now, it appears that the great floods of January 2025 did not kill Garry Rafferty, but they did cause the closure of The Maywentery Golf Course for a couple of weeks. This is another example of sustainability affecting the economy, and one that, if The Maywentery Golf Course had failed to insert a Force Majeure clause into every male members’ contract, would have caused actual financial losses. Sustainability can seem abstract, but these two examples show that it’s just part of day-to-day business for golf courses. There was drought on the course in August 2022. Now for those of you who are unaware, a drought is when there is not enough water, caused by God refusing to cry. So by using lots of water during drought periods, The Maywentery Golf Course helps other parts of London to avoid flooding in the future. But in August 2022, male members were thirsty. The Maywentery Golf Course purchased 13,000 plastic bottles of water imported from the springs of some cave in New Zealand, and set up emergency concession stands on holes four, nine and fourteen, where players could purchase a warm bottle of water for eighteen UK pounds. Expensive? Yes, but not for those in the preliminary stages of heat stroke. This example demonstrates that sustainability is an opportunity as well as a risk, and that a decent profit can be made wherever new markets can be created in a crisis.

I am delighted to announce that The Maywentery Golf Course will be releasing its first sustainability report in 2026, so you can read about all of this soon. I am also delighted that I have been commissioned to write the report, to commence immediately after my internship at Focgee - where the client is loved two point zero - ends in July.

Away from the golf course, sustainability is everywhere. Take Carpet Culture, where I had a very successful internship in 2023 and became close personal friends with the CEO Michael Pollard. Their range of human hair carpets repurposed actual human hair from across the world into soft and luxurious surfaces on which to walk. There was a spot of controversy because women in certain African Commonwealth countries were willingly, I repeat willingly, paid for access to their heads in order to harvest hair on a carpet-viable scale. That same Panorama investigation found that on average 3% of Carpet Culture’s hair-carpet range was pubic. But even if you agree with the shoddy methods used to calculate that percentage (not every curly hair is pubic), to me that’s a relatively small amount and it was used because it added necessary grip. Pubic hair is also more hygienic than head hair, some 20% more efficient at locking away nasty skin droppings. I should also make clear that Panorama did not find any evidence of industrial-scale pubic hair harvesting, only head hair. But anyway, hair-carpets are a niche but successful product, and a quintessential example of the circular economy. 

I can claim credit for the solar panels from which The California Clock Company gets almost zero point four percent of its electricity during the summer, much less in winter. The sun has been used to tell the time since humans were born, using sundials, obelisks and other ingenious methods. And so it is apt that the sun directly powers The California Clock Company today. This is sustainability. Just as an aside, we did try to design the perpetual alarm clock to be solar powered, but the mouth is a dark dark place and tests revealed that it would require a good few minutes every day jaws wide open and facing the sun at a 60-degree angle, which was judged to be both unseemly and unsafe due to tongue sunburn. 

This is a great link to help me to explain that sustainability is not just about the environment. It’s about social issues such as intern safety, intern community impact, job satisfaction for interns, human rights for interns and various other esoteric left-wing causes. At Focgee - where the client is loved two point zero - staff are encouraged and indeed forced to work from their homes rather than commute to an office. Some of us have been beaten to within an inch of our lives for even trying to get into the office. In a further bid to reduce employee stress, Focgee - where the client is loved two point zero - have recently invested over 780 million pounds in artificial intelligence and hope to free over 99.8% of their workforce by 2025, which is this year.

Sustainability goes beyond golf courses that sponsor this podcast or places where I have undercover interned or currently do undercover intern. Hitler’s Volkswagen, for example, were found in 2015 to have installed software in 11 million diesel vehicles worldwide to cheat emissions tests. This software could detect when a vehicle was undergoing an emissions test and temporarily reduce emissions to pass regulatory standards. However, during regular driving conditions, these vehicles emitted up to 40 times the allowed levels of nitrogen oxides, which are harmful pollutants linked to respiratory problems. The scandal had profound repercussions for Volkswagen who ultimately agreed to pay a $14.7 billion in reparations in the United States alone, which included vehicle buybacks, environmental mitigation, and compensation to affected consumers. The total cost of the scandal, including fines, bribes and legal fees, exceeded $30 billion.

The Pacific Gas and Electric Company (I’ll call them PG Criminals for short) caused devastating wildfires linked to the company's equipment and operations. The most notable incident, the Camp Fire, started on November 8, 2018, in Butte County and was traced back to PG Criminal's electrical transmission lines. The Camp Fire resulted in 85 deaths, some 104 fewer than Boeing murdered a week earlier, destroyed nearly 19,000 structures, and devastated the town of Paradise, making it the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California's history. Investigations revealed that PG Criminals had neglected maintenance on its aging infrastructure, with numerous instances of deferred upgrades and repairs. PG Criminal's equipment was linked to several other fires, including the 2017 North Bay Fires, which killed 22 people, some 300 fewer than Boeing recently murdered. PG Criminal's actions and failures were primarily due to neglected maintenance and safety measures. Despite being aware of the risks posed by aging equipment, they often postponed essential work, and inspections and maintenance routines were inadequate, with many components of their electrical grid long overdue for replacement. PG Criminals also prioritised financial performance and shareholder returns over safety measures, leading to underinvestment in infrastructure and safety protocols, despite the increasing risk of wildfires in California. Faced with massive liabilities from the fires, PG Criminals filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2019. The company reached a $13.5 billion settlement with wildfire victims and pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter. No human from PG Criminals was subject to criminal proceedings, obviously. 

This is sustainability. Please vote for me.

I’ve been your host, Guy Snapdragon. My producer is Lee Buckingham. Michael Webb is Chief Legal Officer and Legal support comes from Paul Tout, Simon Warwick, Murray Mackay and Matthew Rook. Accountancy from Graham Cree. Security from David Jarrett. May you use your time wisely, and may your use of wise be timely.