For many years the doom-mongers have been talking about climate change and its become part of the background noise of information overload in a world were news is instant and always competing for attention with every more troubling headlines of crisis – either economic, political or environmental. The latter always there but deemed transitory and often remote from developed Western world.
Well the stars would seem to have aligned in a post pandemic world on the understanding of the potential threat of climate change and the motivation to actually do, and be able to do, something serious about it. So what’s changed and why now?
Well for one the Covid-19 pandemic is a strident wake-up call to the world’s population that humankind is not invincible and that the previously thought fantastical scientific threats (pandemic or climate change) are actually real and therefore not something to be ignore or just too hard to deal with and left in the world’s equivalent of the office’s “too hard” tray.
Secondly, and what has to be good news is that in tandem with the shift in public consciousness of risk is that there has also been a change in the key political power brokers – of course notably in the US with the Biden presidency.
The third and final strand of change and perhaps the most important is the economic momentum has changed with the overriding need for economic stimuli to kick start and regenerate the major developed economies. If money is being made available, through quantitative easing or other fiscal measures, why would you not use it for major infrastructure change and green initiatives on a scale not seen since the Marshall Plan post World War 2. These major capital intensive initiatives could be dedicated to addressing major green themes such as replacement of fossil fuels or creating the infrastructure for the electrification of the automotive industry whilst at the same time creating many jobs and regenerating the world’s economies.
So what next and will it be enough to pull us back from the precipice of climate disaster? The next blog explores this further and investigates the role that the Finance professional can play in driving the activities involved in this seismic shift.
