Protesters march at the Youth Climate Strike in New York City. (Photo by Roy Rochlin/WireImage)
Global leaders, the world’s biggest companies and environmentalists are gathered in New York for the UN Climate Action Summit. The summit is always something of a talking shop, and lots of worthy pronouncements are made. But this year, it feels different.
It’s not just Greta Thunberg’s furious, despairing, excoriating speech to the United Nations. “This is all wrong - I shouldn't be up here,” she said. “You all come to us young people for hope – how dare you. You have stolen my childhood with your dreams and empty words.
“If you choose to fail us, we will never forgive you," she said. "Right here is where we draw the line. The world is waking up and change is coming whether you like it or not.”
It’s not just the millions of people around the world – most of them still at school – who took part in the global climate strike and who give the lie to the accusations that Thunberg is a lone figure being manipulated by her elders. She is the voice of her generation and that voice will become increasingly hard to ignore in the years to come.
It’s not just oil and gas CEOs being called out on their plans to spend $50bn to extract new reserves, which are incompatible with the targets of the Paris Agreement and a net-zero economy by 2050. “That expenditure ignores the inevitable reality of the carbon-constrained future already underway,” former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres wrote in the New York Times. “The shelf life of these companies in their current form may be more than five years — but is certainly no more than 30.”
Speaking at a meeting of the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, she added: “Frankly, my dear friends, I think you have a rough road ahead.”
It’s not just that ExxonMobil, the most climate-sceptic of the oil majors and once the biggest company in the world, has just dropped out of the S&P 500’s 10 biggest companies for the first time ever.
It’s not just that Amazon has committed to be carbon neutral by 2040 after a wave of protests by employees, in the same month that companies started boycotting Brazilian suppliers in protest at the Brazilian government’s failure to tackle fires in the Amazon, or the outcry over the fires in Indonesian forests.
It’s not just that Daimler, the pioneer of the internal combustion engine, announced the end of all R&D into petrol and diesel engines in favour of electric vehicles.
It’s not just the UK announcement that offshore wind – until recently seen as one of the most expensive renewable energy options – will provide power more cheaply than existing gas plants by 2023. “Even last year, renewables had not been expected to reach this tipping point until 2030,” according to the climate change website Carbon Brief.
It pays to follow the money on the climate issue – and it is clear which direction that is heading. More than 130 banks that hold $47 trillion in assets – representing a third of the global banking industry – signed up to the Principles for Responsible Banking and pledged to align their business strategies with the targets of the Paris Agreement and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Meanwhile, investors managing more than $2 trillion of assets committed to make their investment portfolios carbon neutral by 2050, as part of the Net Zero Asset Owners Alliance.
The world is waking up and change is coming whether you like it or not.
Youth Climate activist Greta Thunberg speaks during the UN Climate Action Summit at the United ... [+]
And 87 global companies across 28 countries and based in 27 countries, with a combined market cap of more than $2 trillion and more than 4.2 million employees said they will be net-zero by 2050. They are among 650 companies that have signed up to Science-based Targets that commit them to cut emissions in line with climate science. That may not sound like many, but they will achieve their goals in part by working with their supply chains and consumers, so the impact and reach will be much bigger than if they were dealing with direct emissions alone.
There were also initiatives aimed at cutting the environmental impact of buildings (Zero Carbon Buildings for All), reducing the impact of hard-to-decarbonise, energy intensive sectors such as cement and steel (Leadership Group for Industry Transition) and reducing the climate impact of refrigeration and air conditioning (the Cool Coalition). Seventy organisations involved in the shipping sector, including Maersk and Shell, have signed up to the industry’s Getting to Zero Coalition, while the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative has unveiled plans to accelerate the rollout of carbon capture, utilisation and storage, as well as cutting methane emissions.
Other announcements focused on biodiversity, energy efficiency (the Three Per Cent Club), food-related emissions, air pollution and climate adaptation.
It’s not just the sheer number of pronouncements that is important – it’s the breadth and depth of coverage as well. Not just so many different sectors of the economy, but so many different parts of society – from national governments to schoolchildren, workers to CEOs, banks to steelmakers.
It suggests that there is a momentum for change, with each initiative reinforcing the others and creating a new normal where low carbon is the default. There is still a very long way to go, and a huge amount of work to do, but Thunberg is right when she says that “change is coming – whether you like it or not”. Our challenge, individuals, businesses and governments, is to be ready for that change.
