My journey with climate change
In the summer of 2009, I landed in the Arctic. It wasn’t a planned trip. I managed to get up to 85–87N, not quite the North Pole, but almost. I was in Finland when the transaction I was working on became unviable for the listed company. I could have returned to London, but I chose to travel to the northern tips of Europe instead (another story for another time as not to digress from my journey here with climate change).
After a brief stop at the Sodenkyla Midnight Sun Festival, where I satiated myself watching film-noir from dawn to the following dawn and had the pleasure of holding my eyelids open to watch the last scene of Charlie Chaplin’s remastered ‘The Gold Rush’ accompanied by the Oulu Orchestra before very sleepily catching the last bus back to Rovaniemi (an in-between town, best known for Santa’s Grotto!) ahead of my big sixteen-plus hour journey to Svalbard the following day.
It seemed straightforward — I took the bus from Rovaniemi to Tromso and then flew to Svalbard — all the while wanting to see how far North I could get. If you are wondering, here is the trip on a map and I only got halfway up to the North Pole. I eventually landed in Longyearbyen and found my way to Ny Ahlesund.
Here is Svalbard, an archipelago of islands, halfway between Norway and the North Pole. These islands welcome anyone from any part of the world to live there under the Treaty of Svalbard, 1920 making it one of the most international far-flung places on this planet. As a third culture kid, I instantly felt at home. None of these photos does any real justice in terms of the magnificence and beauty of nature. Its abundant wildlife with a history of destruction, colliding on every corner of this frontier town. It makes you see the fragility of human existence against the backdrop of the power and expanse of nature. During the summer, the sun doesn’t set. Each day I encountered a flurry of scientists and artists often talking a language of hope, of the possible, and of living day-dreams. Where a floret of broccoli costs €5.00 (2009 price).
I stayed up there for an unforgettable nine days where I spent time with geologists, climate scientists, a team of twenty-five from ESA and NASA, each of whom had decades of experience. They were launching a hot air balloon into the upper stratosphere to collect cosmic dust. The experiment was for a complex understanding of space weather and the earth’s magnetic shifts. What I took away was this: We are interfering with Earth’s carbon cycles and we don’t know how bad it will be. It was as clear to me that there were many unknown unknowns and the data for this was vast, complex and also a gaping hole.
Seeing that experiment transformed me in many ways, but most importantly, it was from this point on my journey of climate curiosity became my life’s journey of wanting to understand more about the climate, our unabated growth and what I could humbly do to share this understanding with those who wanted to come on this journey and somewhere along the way transform the way we live on this planet. Since that time, I have read, shared my thoughts and spent time with specialists across so many aspects to humbly learn.
We live on a volatile planet and the last 10,000 years have been an outlier in terms of weather on Earth’s 4.5 billion year history. Here is an example of Earth and global temperatures:
Now, see that last red blip — it was a short sharp dip where the polar caps melted and here is the proof of it:
What caused it and why it happened is not relevant to this post. What’s important is these sudden shifts in temperature can happen and can be extremely destructive.
We need to understand carbon as a network. For example, we have atmospheric carbon we need to do something about. Atmospheric carbon went up while emissions dropped by 5–6% last year when the world shut down. At 450 ppm we can expect a change that may not be reversible and we have the next 5–7 years to hit the right actions, policies and financing to stop this. As humans, we release more carbon than what the planet can absorb which is causing the temperature to increase and we need to do something about that. We are making our oceans more acidic as atmospheric carbon is driving up ocean acidification to the detriment of marine life. We also need to figure out how to keep this temperature increase to 1.5–2C, who pays for the technology changes, change in lifestyle, process and much more for making sure we do this.
Our story of climate change really begins with the Industrial Revolution and the increase in fossil fuel-based economic growth. This has resulted in humans emitting 50GT of GHC every year so we need to get to Net Zero by stopping all emissions whilst taking out the emissions already in the atmosphere. In Bill Gates's new book, aptly titled How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need he writes about this and prescribes solutions. This means, by 2030, we need to drop annual emissions to 25GT.
Most people I have spoken to are simply unaware of what we are sleep-walking into, much like we did with Covid-19. Individuals attribute to 2/3 of emissions (UNEP) and simply want the government to solve it. Individuals care but don’t know what to do. Corporates care but use regulation to get by. Politicians use policy and duality to kick the can further down the road.
Attacking the climate emergency is about each of us doing all we can and as fast as we can. On one side there is an adjustment in our behaviour and the use of renewals. On the other side are the novel technologies which are decades away from practical use. Both have a part to play.
In all my experience with startup and investing, surely people would favour the easy option but here is the confounding part: they want the technologically challenging stuff like carbon capture and sequestration which are decades away from commercialisation. Some of these technologies have been around since the early ’70s with limited success. Solar, battery, and wind are cheap and a real alternative and yet, nowhere near optimised. On a windy day in the UK or when demand drops, we actually stop the wind turbines and the National Grid pays out compensation and the cost of this is added to the customer’s electricity bill.
Annual investment in CCUS has consistently accounted for less than 0.5% of global investment in clean energy and efficiency technologies (IEA, 2020b) and carbon removal will require many folds of its current investment base to be a small part of the solution. While we will need it later on, we should not focus on this while we have so much to do beforehand.
A recent World Economic Forum report concluded that “Businesses should first do what they can to save the planet: Reduce carbon emissions and nature loss, eliminate waste and switch to renewable energy sources. Positive transitions across infrastructure, energy, food, land and ocean use could lead to $10.1 trillion in annual business opportunities and 395 million jobs by 2030.” Decarbonisation is a real financial opportunity and if done correctly post-pandemic, it may just help the world get back into a newly found growth of working together as a group, a collective and as a planet. Decarbonizing the global economy will require fundamental structural changes which should be designed to bring multiple co-benefits for humanity and planetary support systems. We did this before with the Ozone and actually fixed the hole by banning CFC. We did it with the record-breaking Covid-19 vaccine. Surely we can come together for our beloved planet Earth, our only home.
● Scientists agree that to get on track to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C, emissions must drop rapidly to 25 gigatons by 2030. (UNEP)
● Collectively, if committed — policies and real action can deliver a 7.6% emissions reduction every year between 2020 and 2030, we CAN limit global warming to 1.5°C.
● 10 years ago, if countries had acted on this science, governments would have needed to reduce emissions by 3.3% each year.
● In the past six years, global assets managed according to sustainable-investment strategies more than doubled to $30.7 trillion. This is equivalent to one-third of all managed assets (source: McKinsey).
● ESG controversies wiped $500bn off the value of Fortune 500 companies in the last five years (source: Bank of America).
● Addressing climate change is like a chess game and we need to play with all the pieces collaboratively, and strategically, to win and at the heart of it is data.
● Diatoms, the tiny algae plankton which is nature’s own carbon sink found in oceans and permafrost does more for the planet literally giving us the oxygen and then hoovering the carbon, may just save the day.
