At the beginning of March, the proposed climate disclosure rule from the US Securities and Exchange Commission arrived at the finish line – or the starting line, depending on how you see it. On LinkedIn, the reception was best described as very, very well-rehearsed; after all, we’d had about two years to prepare, both for its arrival and its underwhelming ambition.
Policy-making is designed to proceed at a slow and deliberative pace, climate emergency or no. And the more parties involved, the slower it gets. I spent about a decade working in the maritime sector and found the multi-governmental body responsible for setting standards to protect and preserve our shared high seas – the International Maritime Organization – a study in impotence. Progress could be stymied by a handful of countries that just didn’t want to go along. And what goes for our shared waters, goes as well for our shared atmosphere.
I noted some frustrated sustainability types on LinkedIn who would abandon the governmental, rule-making approach to climate action, feeling that investors, employees and customers themselves are more reliable engines of climate action. And these three groups probably are, but only sporadically and in isolation. They don’t drive large, society-wide change. This isn’t like the social media revolution, when people thought they were changing the world by downloading some software; this is redesigning and rebuilding our civilizational hardware on an entirely different foundation.
Where does this leave us when taking into account the carbon budget – which is shrinking far too fast – and temperatures – which are rising far too fast? When we’re looking back at the climate data in 50 years or so, it’s likely that we’ll say we breached the barrier of 1.5 degrees of warming compared to pre-industrial times in the middle of this decade. No one enjoys saying it, but we’re headed for a significant overshoot of 1.5 degrees, 2 degrees, or even more.
I once saw coverage of yet another shooting in the US; the news coverage transitioned abruptly from politicians giving their usual ‘thoughts and prayers’ spiel to first-responders wearing Kevlar vests. The latter are not swayed by magical thinking. Preparing for a likely eventuality is not the same as wishing for it to happen. It’s just being prudent. It’s about survival.
That’s why the French government recently war-gamed a future scenario of 4 degrees of warming. Thinking that through doesn’t make it more likely to happen; if anything, it may make it less likely to happen (as the actual impacts dawn on us).
In conversation with an advisor to the most recent COP (someone who was involved in the creation of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol), he simply said “it’s time to get ready for a hot world”. He didn’t mean we should give up on mitigation. But it’s time to get much more serious about resilience and adaptation. Recent Verdantix research talks about how few organizations have a comprehensive transition plan; the proportion of those who have thought through resilience and adaptation for those plans is even smaller. But you can’t get low-carbon products to market, either, if supply chains have collapsed due to heat- and storm-driven damages to linear infrastructure.
The news out of the US led many to ask themselves who they should trust to carry us through the climate emergency. It’s not apocalyptic paranoia to conclude that none of the above may come through, and that we need to pivot instead to plan for very specific outcomes based on significant, even dramatic, decades of warming.
