The environment has exploded on to national and global agendas. Sectors such as the airline industry, which are implicated so directly, ignore it at their peril. To carry on as before is to ignore the enormous white elephant in the room.

How well are the airlines facing the challenge? When 74 per cent of our forward-looking concerned consumers say that the industry is failing to take climate change seriously, we have to conclude that the answer is “not very well”.

The focus of attention is on ethics and consumerism as a whole. The spotlight roves from issue to issue, but the overall direction is clear. All sectors will have to deal with the white elephants in their own rooms. A fast-food company can do all it likes to reduce its carbon footprint, but obesity will remain its real issue — and its source of potential competitive differentiation.

As concerned consumerism has burst on to the stage, along come new brands born into and out of this space. Take the brand innocent drinks, whose ethics have been integral since its inception. After eight years it turns more than £100 million and holds third place in the top ten of favourite brands.

Most big brands are playing catchup and it is not only nimble new brands they are chasing. It is also the concerned consumers. About half of them understand carbon offsetting and 44 per cent believe that it is purely a gesture. Consumers have absorbed a new lexicon and have the intelligence to treat it with suspicion.

Concerned consumers do not want gestures; they want companies to make the most of their strengths and resources. It would be helpful if credit cards calculated the CO2 impact of purchases.

Giles Gibbons is managing director of Good Business