E3G

The impact of climate change on business

By Tom Burke

That’s the core message. He was actually very clear about what we must do if we are to avoid the greatest risks of climate change to our security and prosperity.

Now, the Stern report is 700 pages long and you will be glad to know that I am not about to give you even a short summary of the Stern report. But working in business I learnt the advantages of doing things what are called strategy on a page. So here is Stern on a page.

This the Stern report on a page. What Stern is telling us is that we currently emit about 7 Gigatonnes of carbon a year.  We put about 7 Gigatonnes of carbon a year into the atmosphere from the energy system. On business as usual that’s going to grow up so that by 2050 it will reach about 14 Gigatonnes.

What he is telling us is that we have to reduce that, we have to in effect take pretty well all of the carbon of our energy system by 2050 if we are to maintain a stable climate. What he actually says is that we have to aim to keep our concentration of carbon dioxide equivalent in the atmosphere below about 550ppm - double what it was in pre-industrial times, if we want to have any chance of keeping the eventual temperature rise somewhere between 20c and 30c. And having looked at the work on what might be happening when you move beyond 3 degrees it’s not a world you would like to live in, or would like your children to live in.

There are a couple more bits to this. What Stern also says is, if we can do that the easy way or the hard way and the easy way is the lowest cost way of doing it, the hard way is a higher cost way of doing it and not doing anything at all is the highest cost of all.  That is essentially Stern on a page.  There’s some other bits in this, but the key message I take is that this is a two phase problem here.

In the first phase, we have to get the carbon out of our energy system and in the second phase we have to keep it out for what is effectively ever. And don’t underestimate the scale of that. Even if we stop putting carbon into the atmosphere will take estimates very, but, hundreds or maybe thousands of years before concentrations drop back to the pre industrial level.

Our current total addition of carbon to the atmosphere each year is about 10 Gigatonnes – 7 is from the combustion of fossil fuels and the rest is from agriculture, deforestation and other land use changes. They are very difficult to reduce the emissions from them.  The oceans and vegetation between them absorb about 4 Gigatonnes of carbon annually though this is something that was referred to by Tony, there are increasing concerns that the growth in temperature and the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide is reducing the capacity of the planet to buffer those increases.

So if we are going to avoid the greatest risks of climate change, it is a simple proposition: we have to make our energy system carbon neutral by the middle of the century. Since there is no politically available route to a stable climate that does not involve an increase in fossil fuels, especially coal, this means we must move very rapidly to the deployment of carbon sequestration and storage for electricity generation and in transport which is the other very big piece of this we must move very quickly to hybrid vehicles and eventually fuels cells as the primary motive power for our transport fleets.