Why start yet another climate Substack?
When our WWF communications team suggested that I start a new Substack about the nexus of climate and business, I spent a fair amount—probably too much—time thinking of names for it. First was “The Pragmatic Optimist”, but that was already taken, and I’m while think of myself as pragmatic, I wouldn’t claim to be100% optimistic. Then I landed on the “Semi-Sanguine Pragmatist”, which spoke better to my quasi-optimistic feelings; but I worried that “semi-sanguine” was too clever literally by half. So, I went onto Substack and scrolled through the myriad climate change titles looking for some plagiaristic inspiration. In this rising sea of bloggery, I thought how am I possibly going to name yet another climate Substack? And there it was.
With that problem put aside, let me tell you something about who I am. When asked why I work on climate change, I usually start with my fascination with extreme weather, which dates to waking up in the church parsonage when I was two years old to the great Connecticut ice storm of 1973 (my father was a Congregational minister and my mother the organist, and indeed, they are the main reason I am who I am). A world encased in over an inch of ice was enough to make an impression as my earliest memory. Over 50 years later, I still enjoy tracking hurricanes, snowstorms and severe weather. Tornado chasing remains on my bucket list.
I started college as a history major, but after having the Dalai Lama on campus for a four-day symposium on “Religion, Ethics and the Environment”, I decided to change my major to religion and spend a semester in India, Nepal and Tibet. While my thesis would be in Buddhist studies, I wanted to keep one foot in the practical, which is why I minored in…Medieval History. It took until graduate school in international relations for my interests in politics, economics and the weather to coalesce into a deeper interest for a career in climate change.
In 2005, I joined the business team at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change (now the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, or C2ES), a renowned moderate, pragmatic think tank whose mission was to see a price on carbon, ideally a cap-and-trade bill, enacted in the US. The Kyoto Protocol had launched what was supposed to become a global carbon trading program eight years earlier, and the EU was starting its emissions trading system. The Pew Center was a founding member of the US Climate Action Partnership, a historic NGO-business coalition that created a consensus framework for a federal cap-and-trade bill. Yet as we all know, the financial crisis, a Great Recession and competing health care policy provided too many obstacles for a rational, market-based climate policy.
Another historic bill—the Affordable Care Act—passed in climate’s stead in 2010. It had been 16 years since the previous attempt at health care reform had failed. I remember thinking that the planet could not afford such a gap until we finally created a nationwide price on carbon. Yet here we are today, 14 years later.
Part of the business rationale for a bill 14 years ago was that to make the kind of reductions necessary to keep the earth from warming more than two degrees Celsius (the global goal at the time), we had to start sooner rather than later, or risk needing to have the emissions trajectory fall off a cliff in the 2020s and beyond. Well again, here we are, and it feels like the world has run past the edge of that cliff, much like Wile E. Coyote in the old Looney Tunes cartoons. And we are still suspended in mid-air, running like crazy, but knowing that a fall is not only inevitable, but necessary if we are to reduce global emissions 50% by 2030, particularly in a world where fossil fuel and land use change emissions continue to rise.
Daunting? Yes. Impossible? No. I try to remember that as a kid, we had pockmarks on the hood of our car and ridgetop trees were dying from acid rain. The Ozone Layer was collapsing, and I had no idea that Los Angeles had a mountain backdrop. A few decades later, we’ve solved acid rain in the US, the Ozone Layer is healing (both using market-based tools) and the San Gabriel mountains are regularly visible in their snow-capped beauty.
Speaking of beauty, over the coming months, I’ll be using this space to talk about not only the nexus of business and climate, but also occasionally how it impacts what I see as an amateur wildlife and nature photographer in my travels from the reefs of the South Pacific to the Arctic terns of Svalbard, Norway.
As I mentioned earlier, my father was a church pastor for over forty years, and if he’d gone to work each day hoping to solve world peace by the end of his career, it would have been an exercise in futility. While he preached peace and love, his real ministry was working to make a difference in the world around him and the lives of his parishioners and community, while my mother ministered through the joy of music, one anthem, hymn and postlude at time.
While solving climate change can feel as insurmountable as world peace, even incremental progress is progress, and we need to keep moving forward, together. I’ll be talking about that journey here with you.