Dear Friends,
More than 100,000 people attended Climate Week in New York City in September. It was a weeklong extravaganza of more than 900 events, including panels, roundtables, and cultural offerings – almost doubled in size from last year. This growing attendance, which included a burgeoning number of senior business leaders, was a testament to both the rising awareness and concern around the issue AND the great financial opportunities in transitioning to a low-carbon economy.
It’s this financial part that is so intriguing. In the past, climate action was deemed too expensive – and a dwindling group of naysayers continues to blow that now tinny-sounding horn – but a new reality is finally taking hold. Climate change supercharges heat waves, hurricanes, rainstorms, and wildfires. It damages infrastructure, lowers productivity, and drives up health costs. It is already extremely costly and will pose even bigger financial threats in the future. At the same time, human ingenuity and entrepreneurship are at full throttle, cranking out new products and processes that can both lower our risk and provide huge investment opportunities.
The new mantra: welcome to the next industrial revolution. Only this one will be bigger because it covers so many different areas of our economy, including agriculture, transportation, and construction.
As you will see from our news of hope and concern, this revolution is gathering force. Because it is global in nature, and now provides jobs and financial opportunities on such a large scale, it cannot be stopped. But it can be slowed. And the U.S. could become a laggard instead of a leader in new technologies, depending on the policies we enact.
At a time when climate change is not the loudest talking point in the election, we can take heart that it is becoming so in the world economy. Politics, partisanship, and misinformation cannot trump economic reality: our current path brings economic pain. The new emerging path brings opportunity. It’s not a straight path, but we are on our way.
Sincerely,
The C-Change Conversations Team
Notable Quote
“We have a bridge crisis that is specifically tied to extreme weather events. These are not things that would happen under normal climate circumstances. These are not things that we’ve ever seen at this rate. …It’s getting so hot that the pieces that hold the concrete and steel, those bridges can literally fall apart like Tinkertoys.”
-Paul Chinowski, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder
News of Hope
To get a sense of this new economic reality, take a look at Texas. It is one of the country’s only deregulated electricity markets and has become the country’s number one renewable energy producer, leading in both wind and utility solar production. That means it is running much more on renewables (getting as much as 70% of its electricity from solar and wind when conditions are perfect) and its electricity system is becoming more resilient to extreme weather events – a more frequent occurrence thanks to climate change. As the chart above shows, Texas is doubling down on renewable technologies, a clear example of economics winning over partisan fervor.
And this reality is hitting at the national level as well. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the largest climate policy ever enacted in the U.S., was designed with two goals: boosting economic growth and lowering greenhouse gas emissions (and therefore climate change destruction and costs). The IRA is credited with creating more than 300,000 new jobs and making us less dependent on China for manufacturing. It also gives individuals substantial incentives to make homes more resilient to climate change, including upgrading with insulation, windows, doors, and heat pumps, locking in savings over the long term.
That makes the IRA bill hard to repeal, especially when 85% of projects and 68% of jobs created by the IRA are in Republican areas, with the South and Midwest benefiting the most from new projects. That’s why senior Republicans are espousing support for parts of the bill. It’s also why many experts at Climate Week stated they believe the energy transition in the U.S. cannot be stopped by a potential Trump administration despite heated rhetoric promising to do so. The economic benefits are simply too great. And the recent lowering of interest rates further bolsters this momentum, as this is widely expected to jumpstart more clean tech projects.
Around the world, renewable energy continues on its rapid trajectory as well. Last year, more than 40% of the world’s electricity was generated by zero-carbon sources, and that upward trend seems to be continuing. In the first half of this year, the E.U. generated more electricity from wind and solar than from fossil fuels. Global solar installations are up 30% from 2023. And in a poignant milestone, the United Kingdom (the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, which precipitated climate change) shut down its last coal plant in September.
American coal plants are also shutting down, but there is a growing interest in repurposing them as renewable energy plants. Because they are already connected to the grid (and it now takes much longer to get onto the grid than to build a new clean energy facility) their grid interface is a valuable asset. Keeping the plants working also protects jobs. This type of repurposing of assets has the potential to let the U.S. double the capacity of its electricity grid quickly.
In the transportation sector, another milestone was announced this month: Norway now has more electric vehicles on the road than gas-powered cars, and 90% of new vehicle purchases are electric.
Before moving on to our concerns for the month, let’s take a moment to appreciate solar as more than our biggest renewable energy source. Solar gets a bad rap at times – it takes up a lot of acreage, including our precious farmland, and it’s not always what we’d call picturesque. But today’s solar farms are doing much more than gathering light. The land around and below the arrays is growing food and serving as havens for biodiversity in nature. It’s a win-win approach – collecting sunlight for clean power and protecting our natural resources all at once.
News of Concern
It can be hard to see the big picture of climate change, but attribution science is helping us to understand – in real time – how it impacts our weather. A new study from Climate Central and the Red Cross shows us just how powerful climate impacts are on heat waves around the world. For example, without human-caused climate change, Ecuador would normally experience about 10 extremely hot days in a 12-month span. This past year, that number was 180.
It’s not just heat. Excessive rainfall is becoming more frequent as more water vapor evaporates into the air from our warmer oceans – and attribution science has linked extreme deluges, like the recent floods in Central Europe, to climate change. And scientists say we’ll see more events like the flooding we saw in areas of North Carolina – 18 inches in 12 hours in Carolina Beach – in September.
Weather extremes are also impacting our infrastructure – highways, runways, buildings, and more – in ways that might not be visible to the eye. America’s bridges are a huge concern, and not just because about one-quarter of them were built in the 1960s. Extreme heat and increased flooding linked to climate change are rapidly speeding up disintegration – one in four steel bridges in the U.S. are in danger of collapse in the next 25 years.
We did a horrified double take when we read new research that said Canada’s massive wildfires in 2023 produced more carbon emissions than any country except China, the United States, and India. While another study documented that these fires were unprecedented, it also warned that the risk of future extreme wildfires is increasing as forests become drier, winters get warmer, and droughts last longer.
The worst drought in a century in Namibia has led to a heartbreaking decision. The government announced it will kill elephants, zebras, and hippos – more than 700 – to feed its citizens, who have been facing extreme food insecurity. It’s another blow to the continent. Though they only account for 10% of greenhouse gas emissions, African nations are losing 5% of their GDP annually because of climate change. It’s a devastating cycle and it’s a global crisis.
As we said above, we’re still buoyed by the nonstop innovation in clean technology and climate solutions. But it’s not quite there yet. Offshore wind has hit the doldrums, bedeviled by high interest rates, setbacks, and accidents that are fueling delays and controversy – including protests from anti-wind groups funded by fossil fuel and nuclear interests that are spreading debunked stories that wind construction is harming whales.
Notable Graphic
Pulling back on the Inflation Reduction Act would not be good politics or good business on the state and local level. More than three-quarters of clean energy investments have been made in Republican areas ($268.5 billion compared to $77.4 billion in Democratic districts).
Notable Video
A carbon border tariff has been launched in the EU and similar tactics are gaining traction in other places around the world. Take a look at how Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana discusses how a “foreign pollution tax” could benefit Americans economically while increasing our geopolitical stability.
