Fluent Essays

Climate Change. Please read the attached articles and let me know what can be done by individuals as well as governments to affect change. Write a 350-word paper on this1/12 May 8, 2020 The Paths to Net Zero foreignaffairs.com/articles/2020-04-13/paths-net-zero For 30 years, diplomats and policymakers have called for decisive action on climate change— and for 30 years, the climate crisis has grown worse. There are a multitude of reasons for this failure. The benefits of climate action lie mostly in the future, they are diffuse and hard to pin down, and they will accrue above all to poor populations that do not have much of a voice in politics, whether in those countries that emit most of the world’s warming pollution or at the global level. The costs of climate action, on the other hand, are evident here and now, and they fall on well-organized interest groups with real political power. In a multipolar world without a responsible hegemon, any collective effort is difficult to organize. And the profound uncertainty about what lies ahead makes it hard to move decisively. These political hurdles are formidable. The good news is that technological progress can make it much easier to clear them by driving down the costs of action. In the decades to come, innovation could make severe cuts in emissions, also known as “deep decarbonization,” achievable at reasonable costs. That will mean reshaping about ten sectors A wind farm near the Nufenen Pass, Switzerland, September 2016 Denis Balibouse / Reuters https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2020-04-13/paths-net-zero http://www.energy-transitions.org/content/accelerating-low-carbon-transition 2/12 in the global economy—including electric power, transportation, and parts of agriculture—by reinforcing positive change where it is already happening and investing heavily wherever it isn’t. In a few sectors, especially electric power, a major transformation is already underway, and low-emission technologies are quickly becoming more widespread, at least in China, India, and most Western countries. The right policy interventions in wind, solar, and nuclear power, among other technologies, could soon make countries’ power grids far less dependent on conventional fossil fuels and radically reduce emissions in the process. Technological progress in clean electricity has already set off a virtuous circle, with each new innovation creating more political will to do even more. Replicating this symbiosis of technology and politics in other sectors is essential. In most other high-emission industries, however, deep decarbonization has been much slower to arrive. In sectors such as transportation, steel, cement, and plastics, companies will continue to resist profound change unless they are convinced that decarbonization represents not only costs and risks for investors but also an opportunity to increase value and revenue. Only a handful have grasped the need for action and begun to test zero-emission technologies at the appropriate scale. Unless governments and businesses come together now to change that—not simply with bold-sounding inte1/7 May 18, 2020 How the Private Sector Can Combat Climate Change foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2020-04-13/unlikely-environmentalists There’s a reason climate change is often described as a “wicked problem.” Fully decarbonizing the economy will require not only completely transforming the global energy infrastructure, at a cost of many trillions of dollars, but also retrofitting all of the world’s buildings, remaking the planet’s agricultural practices, and revolutionizing transportation systems. It is difficult to see how this can be accomplished without some kind of global carbon tax or regulatory regime. But putting such a system in place is proving to be enormously difficult. The 2015 Paris agreement on climate change was a good first step, but many countries show little sign of meeting the commitments they made as part of that agreement, and the United States’ withdrawal from the process has presented a significant barrier to further progress. Given the slowing global economy and the slide toward populism and nationalism in much of the world, the prospects for any kind of comprehensive global accord seem increasingly remote. So far, at least, the public sector is failing to confront the problem. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, center, with French President Emmanuel Macron, right, in Paris, July 2019 Michel Euler / AP https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2020-04-13/unlikely-environmentalists 2/7 But the private sector has begun to step in to fill the vacuum. In January, Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, declared that “climate risk is investment risk” and announced that going forward BlackRock would ask every firm in its portfolio to disclose its carbon emissions. BlackRock has roughly $7 trillion under management and is one of the largest shareholders in nearly every publicly traded firm in the world. So companies around the world paid attention when Fink went on to say that BlackRock would consider voting against boards whose firms “do not make sufficient progress” in addressing climate-related risks and would cease to invest altogether in some fossil fuel projects. Fink is not alone. Many of the world’s largest asset owners are coming to the conclusion that climate change is the most important risk to the long-term health of their portfolios. More than a third of global invested capital—about $19 trillion—is controlled by the world’s 100 largest asset owners. Nearly two-thirds of this money is in pension funds; the remaining third is in sovereign wealth funds. These funds are now so large that they are sometimes referred to as “universal owners” or “universal investors” since, in effect, they hold the entire market. For that reason, they cannot diversify away from the risk of climate change—a risk that Mark Carney, who until earlier this year was the governor of the Bank of England, suggested could result in an abrupt financial collapse, potentially wi