Don't Wait for "Someone Else" to Fix It

Several years ago I was in Senegal when the car I was in got a flat tire, in the middle of nowhere. We couldn’t get the wheel off because the key to remove the bolts was missing. And it was getting dark.

As it turns out, our problem was short-lived. My Senegalese colleague stood at the side of the road waving his arm and every single car that passed us stopped to help. The road wasn't very busy, but within a few minutes we’d found a driver with a matching key.  We changed the tire and were back on our way.

If you get a flat on I-95 in America, or the M4 in Britain, other drivers will rarely stop. They assume you will have paid for your AAA (or AA) membership, or will use your phone to call a tow truck for assistance. In other words, “Why should I help? Someone else will come along, and they'll be better equipped.”

Cellphones were not very common in Senegal at the turn of the millennium. Neither were professional roadside assistance companies.  As a driver you knew that if someone was broken down on the side of the road, they needed your help.  And you knew that if your car broke down you would have to turn to other motorists for assistance.

When it comes to climate change, too many of us pretend that we're all driving down I-95 or the M4 with a cellphone and paid-up roadside assistance.  We continue on our way, confident that someone else will take care of it.

Too many companies and individuals make only token efforts at carbon management. More and more businesses may measure their carbon footprint, but scratch below the surface and you'll find the exercise confined to a small team - and for a worryingly large number of firms, data quality remains an issue.  Fewer than one in ten FTSE 100 companies use carbon neutrality to take immediate responsibility for their greenhouse gas impact, with many making pledges to get around to it sometime in the next 35 years. And efforts to spread carbon management throughout the corporate value chain are only just beginning.

When it comes to the corporate response to climate change, we can't pretend that token gestures will be enough.  In reality, we're all driving on that lonely road in turn-of-the millennium Senegal. Tackling climate change is every company's responsibility.  Don't wait for "someone else" to deal with it.

The 'Critical Decade' and Unburnable Carbon

There has been a massive disconnect between the concerns about catastrophic, multi-billion dollar climate change impacts and the types of measures that most governments propose for tackling the challenge.

In the U.S., for example, the Environmental Protection Agency's climate change impacts website features a photo of a town submerged by floodwaters:

and yet the agency summarizes its approach to fighting climate change as a collection of  "common sense measures to reduce greenhouse gas pollution", and encourages people to take steps "such as walking or biking to work".  The message seems to be, yes we are facing a catastrophic, life-changing threat, but everything will be fine if we make a few small changes here and there.  One gets the feeling they're not telling us something.

Australians have a reputation for speaking plainly. Even so, the language in a recent report from the Australian Government's Climate Commission was unusually bracing:

"[M]any consequences of climate change are already evident, and the risks of further climate change are better understood. It is clear that global society must virtually decarbonise in the next 30-35 years. This means that most of the fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground." [emphasis mine]

Such frank language on climate change is rare from a government agency. It represents what one former U.S. politician called "an inconvenient truth". It is even more extraordinary coming from the world's leading coal exporting nation.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Fortunately, a number of organizations have already done the math.

Our atmosphere is finite - if the entire atmosphere were a sphere at standard air pressure, it would be just 2,000 km across.  The illustration below gives a good sense of the limited volume of the Earth's atmosphere.  When we change atmospheric chemistry by releasing billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases, we change how it absorbs and re-radiates heat.

Climate scientists agree that if we are to have fighting odds of keeping temperature increases this century below 2 degrees C (meaning climate change will be bad but not totally catastrophic), total greenhouse gas emissions between 2000-2050 cannot exceed 1,000 gigatonnes CO2e.

1,000 gigatonnes (1 trillion tonnes) seems like a lot - until one recognizes that 13 years in, we have already used 40% of that allocation.  That means we can only emit another 600 gigatonnes over the next 37 years.  At the current rate (which is increasing, not decreasing), we will surpass the 1,000 gigatonne threshold in 2028. This is, as the Australians put it, the "critical decade" for slowing growth and embarking on the path to zero emissions.

Just how high could emissions go if we do nothing? According to the International Energy Agency, world fossil fuel reserves are approximately five times greater than our 2 degrees emissions allocation, not counting further emissions from deforestation, land use change, and chemical processes.  That would mean temperatures that are five degrees or even higher than today's.  Think an ice-free Arctic, dust bowls across the American midwest, methane releases from the permafrost and potentially runaway climate change.  In other words, business as usual will take us far into uncharted territory.  As the Australian Climate Commission notes with characteristic bluntness: "It is clear that most fossil fuels must be left in the ground and cannot be burned."

With international climate change negotiations once again at an impasse, it is time for more frank language. Barring a technological miracle in the next few years, expect other governments to begin echoing the Australians' clear messages.

However, there is no need for businesses and communities to wait. Carbon Clear has found that organizations that take action beyond or in advance of government compliance schemes can gain first mover advantage in the race to decarbonize.  It is clearer than ever that a low-carbon transition is upon us.  How will you spend the rest of the "critical decade"?

An End to Magical Thinking on Climate Change?

Mickey Mouse (c) Disney

Quick quiz: What's the link between the recent measles outbreak in the UK, fiscal austerity as a way to restart economic growth, and the news that global CO2 emissions are about to surpass the 400 parts per million mark for the first time in millennia?

Answer: All three reflect the dominance of magical thinking - or rather, the willingness of citizens and policy makers to make decisions based on supposition and gut feel rather than an understanding of cause and effect or relying on data.

Humans are notoriously bad at math.  It is extremely challenging for most people to identify more than five items in a group without counting them out.  We can rarely perform more than the most basic calculations in our heads.  Statistics, percentages, data analysis - these concepts do not come naturally.

This is a problem because society needs to base its important decisions on sound information.  When we make major decisions using bad information, the results can be catastrophic. As a result, we need to be very careful when we make decisions that affect the rest of society. Science and data are the order of the day, checking and double-checking, not gut feel or wishful thinking.  Unfortunately, that does not always happen.

In 1998, news outlets in the UK reported the results of a study that claimed a link between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) triple vaccination and autism.  Other researchers immediately questioned the study, and no one demonstrated a verifiable cause-and-effect relationship between the vaccine and the condition. It didn't matter.  Thousands of parents, responding to screaming headlines, refused to have their children immunised, believing that somehow avoiding vaccinations would make them safer.

Fast forward to 2013.  The original report has been thoroughly repudiated, and the doctor who published the research has been struck off the General Medical Council register. Meanwhile, over 1,000 children have contracted measles, a dangerous and easily preventable illness and many more are at risk.  The British government is now spending vast sums on a massive vaccination "catch up" campaign to halt the spread of measles, as well as mumps and rubella. These are diseases that were nearly wiped out in Western countries a generation ago.  They have made a comeback  thanks to over-reliance on shoddy data, and now all of us are paying to clean up the mess, not least the families of children who have contracted this horrible disease.

In 2010, Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published a research paper claiming a link between countries' national debt levels and economic growth. In particular, they argued that growth falls dramatically when debt levels exceed 90%.  No matter that the paper had not undergone peer review, that other economists questioned the report and that other researchers were unable to replicate the results.  And no matter that it was hard to work out a cause-and-effect mechanism that would kick in only above a certain threshold.  The report was seized upon by fiscal hawks at think tanks and in governments across Europe and in the United States to justify massive government spending cuts.  The resulting "age of austerity" has seen a change of  government in Italy, riots on the streets of Athens, cuts to public services and benefits in the United Kingdom, and across-the-board budget cuts in everything from air traffic control to national parks in the United States.  One might argue that politicians would have embarked on these measures in any event, but the fact remains that this paper provided intellectual cover and was cited far and wide to justify fiscal cutbacks.

Fast forward to 2013. The original report claiming a link between debt levels and economic growth has been debunked due to questionable methodological techniques and a particularly glaring Excel formula error.  Even the International Monetary Fund, which championed "structural adjustment" and similar austerity measures for developing countries in the  1980s and 1990s, has begun to rethink its initial support of fiscal austerity.  In the meantime, economic output remains anaemic, unemployment has skyrocketed across southern Europe, and in the UK slow growth means that government debt has risen not fallen.

Whether it's in social sciences like economics and sociology, or in the physical sciences like biology and physics, we can make the most confident predictions when there is a logical link between cause and effect, when the research is subject to peer review, and when other resaerchers using the same data reach similar conclusions. To quote the late astronomer Carl Sagan,

"What counts is not what sounds plausible, not what we would like to believe, not what one or two witnesses claim, but only what is supported by hard evidence rigorously and skeptically examined. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

And so to climate change.

Scientists have for decades been researching the link between human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, rising global temperatures, and changes to the global and regional climate. Every ten years, the UN-mandated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) publishes a summary of these research findings, along with recommendations for government action.  The IPCC is comprised of thousands of the world's best climate scientists - physicists, meteorologists, chemists, computer modelers.  Their research is published and subject to international peer review.  They flag past errors and describe how they have subsequently updated their findings.  The findings and recommendations represent the consensus view of  over 120 governments, are cautiously worded and full of caveats regarding potential uncertainties.

The IPCC assessments reports are a triumph of science and data over gut feel.  The process is slow, methodical and cautious.  After all, climate change is a global problem that affects almost every aspect of how we live, work and play.  It is important to make sound decisions based on good information.

So what to make of the news that global CO2 concentrations are about to exceed 400 parts per million for the first time since the Pliocene Era, 3.5 to 5 million years ago?

More magical thinking, I'm sorry to say.  Politicians worry that setting ambitious targets to tackle climate change will cause economic hardship and continue to subsidise fossil fuels, ignoring the costs of climate related disasters like heatwaves and drought, floods and storms, and irreparable damage to our forests and other ecosystems.  Journalists looking for balance have given equal voice to a handful of climate skeptics and recognised scientists who quote the peer reviewed IPCC data.  And the general population, unable to see directly the link between their lifestyles and rising global temperatures and lacking any direct incentives to take action, refuses to change its behaviour.

But all is not lost.  The sudden push to vaccinate children in the United Kingdom shows that we can overcome magical thinking to make rational decisions.  The rapid shift in opinion against a once ubiquitous study on debt and economic growth shows that people can change their minds and consider alternatives when new data becomes available.

The IPCC 5th Assessment Report will be released in late October 2013.  As the impacts of climate change become more apparent to people around the world, I'm hopeful that governments, businesses, communities and individuals will review the IPCC findings, abandon gut feel, and seize this latest opportunity to tackle climate change and embrace a lower-carbon future.

Previously: Science- It Works on Mars and on Earth
Previously: Welcome to the Reality-Based Majority

That Time I Took Advice From a Petroleum Engineer

One of the most important conversations I ever had came about entirely by accident.

One sunny afternoon in the early 1990s I found myself sharing a picnic table with a graduate student from Stanford University's Petroleum Engineering Department (the university changed the department's name in 2006 to Energy Resources Engineering). It was my senior year and the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska was still a recent memory. I was understandably curious to learn why someone would choose to pursue this career path.

"Petroleum is amazing stuff," he said. "Nature has given us these amazing long-chain hydrocarbons. We can break them apart, recombine them and make almost anything. Burning it is probably the least creative thing we can do!"

"That may be," I responded, but those long-chains hydrocarbons are also a great energy source, and we seem to be burning an awful lot of them, when we're not spilling them in the ocean."

"Yes," he conceded, "But we don't have to! We can make electricity any number of ways, and there are plenty of other things we can burn to generate heat. Besides, it's better for the environment.  So let's use those other resources for energy and do something more useful with the petroleum."

And so here I am, 20-odd years later. As a justification for his chosen career path, that petroleum engineer's argument may have been self-serving. After all, the vast majority of the petroleum that goes to refineries is still burnt as fuel - only a minority of petroleum engineers get to play with the substance as a chemical feedstock.

But he described very nicely the rationale behind everything I've done since then.

Burning fossil fuels for energy is easy, but it isn't particularly smart. Making a transition to a low-carbon future means finding ways to live a satisfying life without imposing unacceptable long term costs on families, communities, and the planet. I founded Carbon Clear nearly eight years ago to help accelerate that transition.  Since then, we've helped hundreds of companies improve their response to the challenges posed by climate change.

I wonder whether that aspiring petroleum engineer remembers me or that casual afternoon conversation at Stanford all those years ago.

I certainly remember him.

Related posts:
Making Renewables Work: Understanding Energy Density

Airlines, The EU ETS and Biofuels

Peak Oil: Will We Freeze or Roast?

Carbon Clear's Autumn Breakfast Briefings: Telling the Story

There are only two days to go before the launch of Carbon Clear's autumn Breakfast Briefing series. A good deal of thought went into these sessions, and I like to think they come together to tell a compelling story.  Here's how they fit together.

The first session, on 20 September, will cover the UK Government's new Mandatory Carbon Reporting legislation, which I blogged about a few weeks ago.  I'll be joined at that session by my colleague Vincent Reulet and by Mardi McBrien, MD of the Carbon Disclosure Standards Board.

We'll be talking about why the Government is pushing for mandatory carbon reporting, how this new requirement fits in with other carbon reporting efforts like the EU ETS, the Carbon Disclosure Project and the Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme (CRC), and how companies can both comply with this legislation and use it to gain competitive advantage.  Should be an informative and dynamic event.

A few weeks later, on 2 October, we will be talking about what I sometimes refer to as Carbon Offsetting 2.0.  After the first wave of carbon offsetting in the mid- to late-2000s, there was a lull.  Now, a new crop of companies, from Microsoft to Marks & Spencer, are announcing carbon neutrality programmes.  We'll be discussing how this new round of carbon offsetting differs from the first, and how other companies can benefit.

Then, on 17 October we will be unveiling our Carbon Maturity whitepaper.  Our crack team of consultants has pooled decades of accumulated experience working with over a hundred companies to develop a model of corporate carbon maturity.  We've found that companies at each stage of the maturity curve share certain characteristics and encounter similar obstacles before moving on to the next level.  This applies to both their internal carbon management activities and their carbon offsetting initiatives.  Delegates at this briefing will learn how the carbon maturity model works, and how to benchmark their companies' performance against other businesses.

The breakfast briefing series, then, tells a story.  We start with carbon footprinting and show how it can go from being a burden to a source of competitive advantage.  We then move on to carbon offsetting and show how it has evolved to become a source of real business value for the largest companies.  And then we describe how companies around the world are developing increasingly sophisticated carbon management programmes that deliver benefits for management, employees, investors and the wider community.

I think that's a story that every company should hear. Join us, and help tell the story.

Going Mainstream

This is interesting:

At Carbon Clear, we've been saying this for years, but nice to see this mantra make the cover of CFO Magazine.  (Hat tip: @greenmondaynews)

U.S. Heatwaves: "Weather" versus "Climate"

It's summer, and that means it's time for another round of record-breaking heatwaves in the United States.

The heatwave of the past week has triggered forest fires across the western states. Washington, DC staggered under 104-degree (F) temperatures - the air conditioner load helped prolong a five-day blackout across the eastern states. Back in the 1990s aid agencies used photos of the earth at night to flag underdeveloped countries where people had to live without electricity.  I never thought I'd see those types of images for the suburbs of Baltimore and Washington DC:

Washington-Baltimore on June 28, 2012

A less brightly-lit Washington-Baltimore on June 30, 2012

This is not the first time large parts of the U.S. have faced a massive heat wave.  In fact, they are becoming so common that it might be safe to consider record-breaking temperatures the "new normal".  Which brings us once more to the topic of climate change.

We might define "weather" as the meteorological conditions when you look out the window.  Is it raining? Is it hot?  Weather varies day by day, and it's difficult to predict more than a week in advance.  "Climate" refers to the typical conditions we might expect at a given time of year.  San Francisco is normally foggy on summer afternoons, Montana is typically frigid in winter.  A freak storm or unexpected heat wave is bad weather.  Searing temperatures every summer, year in and year out - that sounds more like climate. If that's not the climate we used to have, then it would be fair to say that the climate is changing.

Climate scientists are generally careful not to attribute any particular weather event to climate change.  Their models of overall change are predictions of longer-term trends.  But the weather we're seeing is beginning to match those predictions.  How long before "longer term" becomes "now"?

Tweeting Against Fossil Fuel Subsidies is Fine, but...

There is a 24-hour "Twitterstorm" currently running to mark the Rio+20 environmental conference in Brazil.  The #EndFossilFuelSubsidies tweet-a-thon is being organised by environmental group 350.org, to help push the issue onto the agenda of world leaders attending the conference.

The logic behind the campaign is obvious: fossil fuel combustion is the single largest source of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.  We burn excessive fossil fuels in part because we fail to factor their environmental impact into the price.  Carbon taxes and cap-and-trade schemes are intended to help send more accurate (higher) price signals and thereby reduce demand.  However, not only are we failing to implement aggressive carbon pricing schemes, nations around the world actually offer  billions of dollars of subsidies that lower the price of fossil fuel production and consumption. Other subsidies are non-financial: relaxing environmental restrictions in protected areas reduces compliance costs for fossil fuel producers, making it easier to increase supply at a given price.

 What would compel otherwise rational decision makers to support such an illogical policy?  In a nutshell, it's a lack of joined up thinking.  Why subsidise fossil fuel production?  To shift the supply curve out to the right - increasing supply, reducing price, or both, as seen below:

Why do we need to increase supply?  Because we are consuming increasing quantities of fossil fuels.  Why are we consuming so much? Because we are not using renewables.  Because our buildings are inefficient, and we travel long distances in inefficient vehicles, and we manufacture large quantities of products in inefficient factories.

Why subsidise fossil fuel consumption? Because otherwise influential voters would revolt, poorer members of society would face fuel poverty, and manufacturers would threaten to take jobs elsewhere. Why are voters, households and employers sensitive to the price of fuel? Because their homes, vehicles and buildings use energy inefficiently and because they do not generate much, if any, of their own local power.

In other words, when confronted with the challenge of people using energy wastefully and failing to use locally available renewables, national leaders have responded with subsidies that boost production and lower the price of fossil fuels!  You can see how policy makers might find this response rational on a case-by-case basis, but from a broader systems perspective the case for these subsidies becomes ludicrous.  This "solution" becomes even more appalling when one considers the environmental cost.

A "big-picture" systems view can tackle these challenges simultaneously from an economy-wide and a local level.  If it is too expensive to drive vehicles long distances when people must face the full cost of fuel, then we can find ways to reduce vehicle miles per person or per tonne of goods: putting homes or factories closer to offices, increasing fuel efficiency, and using mass transit to reduce the number of cars people need to own.  If fuel costs are making homes unaffordable and businesses uncompetitive, then we can find ways to get the same benefits with less fuel: switch to renewables, where the "fuel" (sunlight, wind, etc) is free; or improve building and appliance efficiency so less energy is wasted.

#EndFossilFuelSubsidies is a clever campaign, but we need more systems-level thinking if it is to become more than a slogan that disappears after 24 hours.

Heat Wave 'Rewrites History' Across the U.S.

We're two days into spring, and already it feels like summer across much of the United States.

In Chicago yesterday, the temperature reached 87F (about 30C), the hottest it has ever been this early in the season.  The temperature has exceeded 80 degrees seven times in the last eight days. The average high temperature for this time of year is 49F (9C).

Milwaukee  has experienced its warmest March day ever.  In Caribou, Maine, the average high temperature is 36F (2C); yesterday it was 75 degrees (24C).

So yes, it's hot.

Is climate change to blame?  It's impossible to point to any one weather event and say whether or not we can attribute it to climate change.  But these types of temperature extremes match the predictions of climatologists, who expect the Midwestern US to get hotter and drier over the next few decades.

The heatwave isn't definitive proof of climate change, but it provides us with a 'teachable moment'.  This is weird weather, and everyone is talking about it.  The heatwave comes on the heels of an unusually mild winter, last summer's drought across the Southeast and fires in Texas, floods on the Mississippi, and more.  Each one of these was a "once in a century" event, but they keep coming.

People are beginning to realize that these freak events are becoming more common.  And they have a real impact in lives and money.  Perhaps more of us are beginning to wonder whether we're better served investing in measures that fight change rather than spending to clean up after the fact.

Corporate Carbon Management - Now More Than Ever

The latest round of international climate change negotiations ended one month ago in Durban.  Now that the dust has settled, we can take stock of what the results mean for corporate carbon management.

There were a number of policy announcements from Durban, but the biggest piece of good news is that government negotiators managed to avoid the worst-case scenario, agreeing to set a path to binding emission reduction targets and agreeing to preserve the Clean Development Mechanism in the interim.  The other piece of good news is that, for the first time, major developing nations like China have agreed to set binding reduction targets as an outcome of future negotiations.

Governments around the world have sent a clear signal to business: emission reduction targets are going to tighten, so get ready.

The bad news from Durban is that the deadlines are much too loose.  The Durban Declaration calls on the parties to finalise a post-Kyoto climate change agreement by 2015, with emission reductions beginning no later than 2020.

These targets reflect the difficulty of agreeing potentially painful greenhouse gas emission reductions amongst scores of states with their own political and economic agendas.  However, they fail to reflect the urgency of the climate change crisis.

Mother Nature does not care that it is an election year.  We will not get a reprieve from record drought, record heat and fires, record floods, coral bleaching, and thawing permafrost.

Climate change is happening today.  While it is too late to prevent climate change, we still have time to minimise its impacts.  As we have seen over the past year, the costs of climate change related impacts can greatly exceed the cost of reducing our emissions.

Many politicians seem to have an incentive to encourage business as usual, but companies are in a different position.  The incentives for early and ambitious action on corporate carbon management are clear.

The writing is already on the wall regarding the need to reduce emissions.  Many governments are already putting carbon reporting and reduction rules in place, and the rest are making noises in this regard. Companies that take action now are

thus in a position to gain first-move advantage developing lower-carbon processes, products and services.

Second, while governments may have signalled that carbon reductions can wait - for a few years at least - customers are

more demanding.  Over and over again, surveys show that consumers think more highly of firms that take carbon management seriously. In the UK and internationally, major firms are embracing sustainability at the senior management level in a race to demonstrate their environmental credentials to the public.

Third, Carbon Clear has documented an increasingly direct link between carbon management and financial performance.  Understanding the greenhouse gas emission drivers in a company requires managers to get a handle on resource flows within the business, the efficiency of their production processes, and the ways in which customers use their products and services.  Developing carbon clarity drives efficiencies and reduces costs throughout the company, with a measurable impact on the bottom line, and benefits that can be felt by customers, employees, investors, the finance team, and other stakeholders.

The corporate sector has the potential to drive huge global emission reductions, not only here but in developing countries that form a huge part of the global supply chain.  While government leadership and policy direction are welcome, there's no need to wait.  The benefits of corporate carbon management and the risks of inaction are a spur to immediate action. We need transformative corporate carbon management now more than ever.

Happy Birthday, Carbon Clear!

 
Six years ago today, Carbon Clear was incorporated in the UK.  Back in 2005, the global carbon market was a very different place:

• The Kyoto Protocol had just entered into force
• The EU-ETS had just started operation
• Al Gore’s “An InconvenientTruth” had not yet been released
• ISO 14064-1 had not been released
• The Gold Standard did not exist
• The Voluntary (now Verified) Carbon Standard had not been released
• The UK Dept for Energy andClimate Change did not exist
•  The International Carbon Reduction and Offset Alliance (ICROA) did not exist

A lot has changed since 2005.  We've been priviliged to witness - and contribute to - the growth and evolution of a thriving ecosystem of companies, institutions and individuals committed to the transition to a low-carbon future.

It's been a successful and busy six years at Carbon Clear, but there is still much more to do.  We look forward to helping our customers and partners transform their relationship with carbon.


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