E3G

The impact of climate change on business

By Tom Burke

We will not going get very far in meeting this challenge successfully for ourselves and for our children unless we recognise that what we face is a shared dilemma. All of us need to secure reliable access to energy for our economies to continue to grow, and that growth is necessary to maintain social cohesion and, in the longer run even political stability. For China, for India, for Europe and the United States, as well as for Australia and the rest of the world, the continued use of fossil fuels is going to be for energy security reasons absolutely essential to maintaining that economic growth. That means we are going to continue to expand the use of coal in our economies for the foreseeable future. If we continue to use fossil fuels, including coal, with present technologies, there is then now no doubt at all, as Tony I think adequately demonstrated, that the climate will change rapidly and soon. And if that happens, the very social cohesion and political stability we are burning the fossil fuels to maintain, will itself be put at risk.

So this is a dilemma. It is a real dilemma and it is one that we all share, it is not a problem that you have and somebody has or doesn’t have. We all have it.

Now, the point of a dilemma is that neither of the choices is acceptable. We do not want to give up either the use of fossil fuels or a stable climate. The problem with a dilemma is that you risk being gored by both horns if you take too long to decide what to do. Timidity would produce the worst of both worlds. The trick is to resolve the dilemma not to make false choices. We now urgently need to become much better at sharing the effort, both between and within nations, that will be needed to resolve our shared climate dilemma.

The shape of the climate horn of this dilemma is now clear. Let me illustrate this with some key numbers.

There is a growing body of scientific opinion that recognises that a 20C rise in global average temperature as the threshold of a dangerous climate change. The EU leaders at their Spring Council meeting at the beginning of this month reaffirmed their desire to stay below this threshold.

However, we have already observed a 0.70C rise in global average temperatures since the beginning of the 20th Century. And such is the nature of the climate system that if we were to stop emitting any more greenhouse gases today, we would still see another 0.70C rise in temperature before they stabilised. Now you don’t need to be a better mathematician than I am, and I’m not a very good mathematician, to add 0.7 to 0.7 and realise you are pretty damn close to 2.