Your first choice is Solar by Ian McEwan, which sets out to put the issues of climate change in more of an everyday setting through a novel.

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.

What did you think of the actual novel, because it has had mixed reviews?

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.

Your next choice looks at the world of business. Joel Bakan’s The Corporation explores how one of the most powerful business institutions has managed to successfully hijack governments and let greed take control.

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.

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.

Presumably powerful, self-interested corporations make life difficult in your quest for good energy.

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.

At the moment that is something government legislates about.

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.

Do you think, after all the global economic problems, corporations are getting weaker and a new, perhaps more ethical value-system is taking over?

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.