It’s sunny in Venice today; I’ve just caught the vaporetto across to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore to a Climate Policy Initiative/World Bank/OECD meeting on “Expanding Green, Low-Emissions Finance”.
Looking across the choppy Grand Canal I’m wondering whether the new flood defenses Venice is building at its lagoon entrance will be enough, given the scary reports on Greenland’s ice cap melt trajectory that have been coming out in past weeks.
Earlier this week in London, Carbon Tracker founder Mark Campanale passed me a copy of Bill McKibben’s recent Rolling Stone opus on “the Reckoning” – climate change of course. (Aug 2 edition). How do we reconcile plans by the world’s largest resource extraction companies to burn 2,795 Gigatons of carbon against the maximum 565 Gigatons scientists tells us we can burn to even have a modest chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change (that’s what the International Energy Agency’s chief economist calls it)?
We only have a window of a few years to fix this; which raises the question of whether pushing to shift capital to climate mitigation investments is a quixotic attempt to roll back what is an unstoppable juggernaut?
Maybe it’s just Venice’s famous melancholia getting to me.
So much talk, such modest movement, at least in the context of the vast scale required. Just have to hope that the old aphorism about how change comes swiftly if the ground has been well laid turns out to be true.
I figure that even if we utterly fail to address global warming, the process of trying will help us to work better together globally (OK, I admit I’m a mad optimist). We’ll need that to handle to trans-continental challenges we’re going to face with 6°C global temperature rises (11° Farhenheit), creating whole new deserts where bustling countries used to be. The alternative to better working together will be a descent into a multitude of failed states and a few walled enclosure-style countries. Think post-Roman Empire chaos.
The Doge’s Palace is sparkling across the water.
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BTW:
- In yesterday’s blog an embarrasing typo: it’s Tanguy Claquin at Credit Agricole. Oh, and the bond is AA-.
- If you’re on one of these locations, let’s talk: in Sydney next week, then in Barcelona for IHT’s Clean Energy Conference, Killarney for the Irish Wind Conference ("make Ireland Europe's Green Lab"), Istanbul for Green Business in mid-Oct ("climate investments can fix the current account deficit"), Montreal for ICAO 24 Oct, followed by WDC and NYC. It’s the season to get things moving.
