2050 Is Too Late: Being Strategic About Climate Change
Five years ago, when atmospheric CO2 levels were 408 parts per million (then a record; now hovering ~420 ppm), I wanted to see if I could quantify the impact of energy efficiency gains since the 1970s. How much worse would it be if there had been no such gains? Even with the roughest of calculations, it quickly became clear that by now we would have tumbled over the climate cliff, the 450 ppm threshold scientists have long warned is the point of no-climate-return a distant memory. We would likely be roasting somewhere in the mid-500 ppm range, with coastlines shriveled from rising seas. Geysers of methane, a greenhouse super-gas liberated from permafrost prison by global warming, would have created a climate feedback loop for the ages.
Energy efficiency, mostly boring stuff hidden in walls, bought critical time. That it did so as the human population doubled to eight billion makes it even more astonishing. As a bonus, trillions of dollars in utility bill savings were redirected into the pockets of energy consumers, providing a massive, decades long economic stimulus. Businesses had more capital to invest in growth and distribute to shareholders. Customers had more money to spend.
The cheapest energy is the energy you don’t need, notes Amory Lovins, co-founder of energy consultancy RMI. He calls them “negawatts.”
Efficiency still has a major role to play, but is not nearly enough on its own to keep us safe from the brutal consequences of climate change. All the wrong records are now routinely and repeatedly being broken. Each year is the hottest ever. Droughts are worse. Floods more devastating. Ice sheets are thinner and smaller. Wildfires wilder.
BEYOND PETROLEUM
Climate change has largely been defined as an energy issue and that’s a problem. The maniacal focus on CO2 is a problem. Slashing fossil fuel emissions is absolutely essential for slowing climate change (“First, do no harm”), but the chemical composition of the atmosphere isn’t the only system that’s been knocked out of whack over the last few hundred years.
Everything is out of balance. Entire ecosystems have collapsed, shredded by relentless, industrial-scale deforestation and overfishing. Oceans have become hotter and more acidic, killing off coral reefs, threatening anything with a shell, and anything that depends on anything with a shell. Extinction rates across the species board have accelerated. As much as 40% of the world’s arable topsoil has been degraded, with critical soil microbiomes under siege from a lethal mix of fertilizers, pesticides, insecticides, fungicides, herbicides. Agricultural run-off has led to massive marine “dead zones.” Plastic trash—trillions of tons of it—is everywhere. It is in wildlife. It is in rocks. It is in the food chain. It is in us.
Climate change is all of the above. Reaching “net zero” emissions only matters if there is a habitable planet left to save.
Clean air, clean water and fertile soil are the basic essentials, without which we have no future. Yet often they are served up as kind of bonus, characterized as “co-benefits” of restoration projects trying to sell carbon credits. That’s backwards. These are the full on benefits, with carbon sequestration the serendipitous “co.” Solve for nature and carbon comes along for the ride.
As long as carbon is passed around food chains—plants to herbivores, prey to predators, fungal decomposers to soil microbes, mycelial networks to plants—it stays functionally sequestered near or beneath the surface. The more bountiful, biodiverse and complex an ecosystem, the more carbon is kept out of atmospheric harm’s way.
Life, by far, is the largest carbon sink of all.
There is no “net zero” without “nature positive.” And no “nature positive” without “net zero.”
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With only a few years left to keep a “climate emergency” from exploding into an unstoppable climate catastrophe, panic has finally set in, sparking support for an everywhere, everything, all at once approach. Yet the very urgency demands strategy: prioritizing solutions that can be scaled quickly and, like efficiency, buy time.
The promise of multi-trillion dollar Direct Air Capture (DAC) schemes to vacuum up 2% of global CO2 emissions annually by 2050 won’t mean much if by then everybody has keeled over from “wet bulb” temperatures and crops have routinely failed from drought, flood and fire.
Also important is keeping an eye on what happens to carbon once captured. When injected into wells to pump out more oil, it’s treading water carbon, although even that might be an optimistic accounting. Bundling up those very same CO2 molecules as “credits” to be sold to companies desperate to claim “net zero” status elevates greenwashing to a Gogol-esque art form.
Better bets are solutions that can deliver near-term, measurable benefits, especially those with ancillary benefits and/or benefits, like efficiency, that compound over time.
The battle to slow climate change, if not reverse it, must be multi-front, addressing every angle of this profoundly existential, knotty problem.
Roughly one third of each barrel of oil goes toward producing chemicals and plastics, so scaling up cleaner, greener fossil-free alternatives is critical. It cuts demand for fossil inputs, with the potential to reduce pollution across entire product lifecycles. There are many promising options. Almost everything we make can be made better.
Likewise, investing in nature restoration has to be a top priority. According to a recent UN report, funding levels for Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are currently less than half of where they need to be by 2025, which is only 12 months away. Without robust, dynamic, biodiverse, thriving ecosystems, it really doesn’t matter how much or how little CO2 is in the atmosphere. Trash Eden and there is nowhere else to go.
2050, the target year popular in COP reports and corporate press releases, is too late.
FRAMEWORKS
So there is a need for speed and little margin for error.
Below are three frameworks that can be used to fill in the blanks. The first comes from the field of engineering; the second from the world of branding; the third draws on my experience as a journalist.
Each brings a different perspective, though there is overlap and they can be used in combination. They bring clarity to tackling almost any kind of challenge, from designing energy-efficient buildings, to developing policy and masterplans, positioning startups, pivoting and expanding legacy companies, and making investment decisions.
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Integrative Design
Long championed by RMI’s Amory Lovins, there are four guiding principles of integrative design.
Start with a list of desired outcomes. Think about the potential benefits and also possible unintended consequence upstream and down. For example, consider the implications for supply chain logistics and manufacturing requirements. Think packaging materials, distribution channels and circularity.
Use an ever-expanding palette of technologies, financial and business models. Integrative design is an ongoing process. Even good outcomes can be improved, often through a creative combination of technologies and models. For example, by combining a “Shoe-as-a-Service” take-back model for shoes made of entirely recyclable materials, On, a Swiss athletic shoe company, dramatically improved the circularity of its product. Recycle rates have improved from the typical 5% to more than 80%.
Be a systems thinker. Integrative design is a bio-hack. In nature, everything is connected, with systems, quantum to cosmic, nested within systems. Each part of a system also serves multiple functions. A tree provides shade, wind protection, food, shelter and carbon sequestration (the latter both in its structure and through its symbiotic partnership with fungi). In a building, a well-placed beam can provide structural support, while blocking the hot summer sun but letting in more light during the winter when the sun is lower in the sky. Systems thinking makes it easier to spot feedback loops, good and bad. It encourages multilateral, multidisciplinary thinking.
Choreography is key. It matters what is done first, next, and after that. Buildings designed to LEED and Passive House standards are first optimized for efficiency. That reduces energy needs, making it easier for renewables such as solar to meet most if not all of the demand. Using the principle of integrative design, the energy use of the Empire State Building was reduced by more than 40% .
• Amory Lovins lecture on Integrative Design for Climate Solutions (video)
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Branding
Branding is often understood as clever graphics and aspirational taglines. But at its most rigorous, branding is a process, a form of corporate therapy, drilling down to core questions of purpose and mission: Why does a company or an organization exist? What need(s) does it fill? If the answer begins and ends with “increasing shareholder value,” it is likely the company does more harm than good.
But those that embrace the idea of a “brand promise” and understand their job to be the consistent delivery of value to customers, employees, suppliers and communities, as well as shareholders, those are the companies positioned to go the distance. They are also the ones more likely to understand their responsibility and indebtedness to nature. More than half of global GDP—$55 trillion—is materially dependent on nature’s services, everything from clean water to productive farmland.
Branding is reputation, an intangible commodity of incalculable value.
According to a survey of would-be car buyers, if Apple—which isn’t a car company (yet), but is a very strong brand—were to start selling Apple cars tomorrow, 26% would consider buying one. Branding gives a company the opportunity to prove its worth. Again and again and again.
Brand strategy is more—or can be more—than reading data tea leaves for marketing insights and customer leads. To see who tomorrow’s customers could be, or who the stakeholders two, five, even ten years out might be, takes imagination. It requires nonlinear thinking, eclectic interests, and exceptional peripheral vision for spotting trends only just starting to come into view. It helps to have sense of humor, too, which somehow makes it easier to see unexpected, serendipitous combinations: the “adjacent possibles” of new markets, new products, new services and potential collaborations.
“What is actual now enables the next possible: the adjacent possible,” explains complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman, who coined the phrase.
An openness to this kind of thinking dovetails with the second principle of integrative design: the use of an expanding palette of technologies, business and financial models to improve outcomes. There is magic in the mix, in envisioning how things could be used in an entirely new ways. It opens doors for truly game-changing innovation.
Integrative design provides a solutions-focused methodology. Branding prepares companies for the future, for selling those better answers.
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Picking Winners
The third filter, The 7 Characteristics of Better Answers, (7C Index) is about making smart bets.
The are at least 500 clean-tech accelerator programs, most new within the last couple of years, collectively nurturing thousands of startups around the world. The Inflation Reduction Act unleashed billions of government dollars to kickstart research in hydrogen, battery, carbon sequestration and other green technologies. Companies are investing in regenerative agriculture. Nonprofits support Nature-based Solutions. “Net zero” pledges drive demand for carbon and biodiversity credits.
The 7C Index is a reporter’s shortcut, a checklist to quickly size up and compare technologies, business models, financial models, plans and policies.
The ones most likely to succeed are:
Small
Modular
Flexible
Adaptable
Scalable
Cheap at the unit cost
Riffable
The more boxes checked, the better the odds of success. Think Lego bricks for the first six. The seventh, “riffability,” brings a jazzy serendipity to the mix, encouraging experimentation with different materials, tweaks in processes, and new combinations of technologies and business models.
Like branding, the 7C Index celebrates the adjacent possible. Like integrative design, it embraces systems thinking.
DEFYING THE ODDS
The Earth is riddled with the bones and fossilized remains of everything that ever was. Almost every life-form that slithered, oozed, walked, galloped or flew onto the planetary stage over the last nearly four billion years has also given a final bow: 99.9% extinct.
Among them were many whose tenure far outlasted the 300,000 years of our species, Homo Sapiens, and three million years of our genus, Homo. That we—indeed everything alive today—exists at all is the result of far too many improbable adjacent possibles to count. Including climate change, which isn’t always bad news, or at least bad news for everyone.
Shifts in climate can provide a competitive advantage. Forty thousand years ago, global cooling likely played a role in the disappearance of our cousins, the Neanderthals. Populations of large game animals thinned out when the plants that made up their diet struggled with colder conditions. In turn, the Neanderthals, who depended on the animals for food and clothing, were left hungry and cold, caught in a cascading disaster.
The Older and Younger Dryas, also periods of cooling, took place over a span of almost three millennia ending 11,500 years ago. They have been linked to the emergence of agriculture and the origins of human civilization.
And now here we are in 21st century, literally engineering a climate change that could lead to our own demise.
We are the last of the Homo family. For three million years our story has always been the same, always ending in extinction. Genetic ghosts of Denisovans and Neanderthals live on in our DNA, but we are the finale, the caboose, the final chapter, the last chance.
By contrast, there are nearly 3,000 species of mosquitoes in the world today from a lineage stretching back 125 million years. Will they be next to inherit the Earth? Who knows? Nature has a deep bench. If not for an asteroid, our ancestors might still be waiting for their turn, scurrying under leaf litter and hiding in burrows.
But there was an asteroid and now, defying the odds, we are currently the planet’s dominant species. Yet we have been profligate, polluting land, sea and air, killing off other species, killing off each other.
What is wrong with us? How can we so spectacularly squander such an extraordinary gift? Clearly, we are smart enough to be our own worst enemy. Could we possibly be our own best savior?
Or will the story repeat one last time, our legacy unique only in that our end was of our own doing?