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Commentary: When hope is all you have left in dealing with climate change

March 23, 2023
By: Mark Skinner

The press release for the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) opens in what has become a tradition for environmental reporting: a dire statistic intended to inspire a desire for action. This time, it’s that average global greenhouse gas emissions for the 2010-2019 decade were the highest levels in human history. The strategy has worked on the world’s young people and the small handful of people out of 100 who vote for and contribute to environmental change each year (less than 4% of American charitable giving went to environmental/animal welfare organizations in 2021). Unfortunately, these crowds are both powerless and too small.

The second sentence of the latest IPCC press release is also predictable: “Without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, limiting global warming to 1.5°C is beyond reach.”  [Emphasis added.]

What the IPCC doesn’t do next, after sounding the alarm based on three year old data, is point out that global carbon dioxide emissions actually increased to even higher record levels in 2022, according to the New York Times story. The finger for the emissions increase, according to the story, is pointed toward Russia invading Ukraine and disrupting the global energy markets. The nearly negligible decrease in global emissions experienced with near-global economic shutdown during the first year of the pandemic followed by the record emissions in 2022 is ample evidence for drawing the conclusion that 1.5 degrees is a given. The only unknowns are how fast it will get worse and how bad things will really get.

The IPCC report clings to the ‘positive’ strategy of shilling hope. The report outlines all of the innovations and technologies we already have created that could turn the situation around if implemented immediately and completely. Sure, it points out, we need to increase financial flows on these technologies up to six-fold, but hey, there’s hope! In the economic development world, we could at least make an effort to mitigate and reverse our own contributions, right?  Federal dollars intended for regional development could be applied to meaningful change for a better future, right?  At least we could commit that they wouldn’t add to the problems because we’re in the innovation business and the IPCC says investing in and deploying innovation as fast as possible is critically needed. Fixing the future would create jobs and opportunity.

There were signs of hope in that direction, too, when during the first few months after taking office, the Biden White House released a statement regarding the American Jobs Plan that said “Every dollar spent on rebuilding our infrastructure during the Biden administration will be used to prevent, reduce, and withstand the impacts of the climate crisis.

Yet the IPCC tells us to act. So the calls to action for the TBED and conventional economic development communities are to:

  1. Read the IPCC’s report, become familiar with the technologies and innovations the hundreds of experts involved in the report’s production believe might help us slow down the rate of fall over the inevitable tipping point.
  2. Peruse your recent and current portfolio of research projects, client companies and startup investments. Map the relationships to what you’re doing to “improve” your regional economy and the IPCC priorities.
  3. Revise your organizational objectives, program priorities and designs, funding criteria, proposal requirements, due diligence process, selection filters, and performance metrics.
  4. Help everyone else in our community to do the same things.
  5. Then, sleep well each night, knowing there is reason to hope for truly positive change.
climate change, tbed