GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY
Columnist Chris Tomlinson says climate change offers a chance for real leadership.
Leaders are judged by what they leave behind, by whether their communities or businesses are better off because they stepped up to the challenge.
A great legacy is what distinguishes a leader from a manager. Managers keep the ship on course, maintain the status quo and deal with tactical issues. Not an easy task, but neither is it transformative.
Great leaders balance today’s needs with tomorrow’s demands. Leadership is persuading others to make immediate sacrifices to derive future benefits.
In an era of radical change, such as ours, the world needs great leadership. Change stresses our society, and frightened critics demand a return to an idyllic past, which existed only in their imaginations.
Surveying the political-economic landscape, the tension between regressive impulses, immediate needs and long-term obligations shapes almost every debate. That’s true especially for the overarching challenge of our time: climate change.
This year will go down as the fourth-warmest on record, while 20 of the warmest years have occurred within the last 22, according to the World Meteorological Organization.
The world is already witnessing the effects of a warmer planet. Storms are more severe, wildfires burn hotter, and sea levels are rising. Species are going extinct at a dramatic pace, and crops are failing from shifting weather patterns. Millions of people are on the move fleeing these changes.
None of these facts is disputable. Nor should anyone dispute that the climate is changing faster than at any point in Earth’s history. The timing and scale correlate with rising emissions of humanmade greenhouse gases.
The federal government’s new National Climate Assessment documents these facts, in meticulous, peer-reviewed detail. These are not predictions. These things have already occurred.
We may not want to believe, but “facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored,” as Aldous Huxley famously observed.
Business executives must decide whether they will ignore the facts or whether they will strategize ways to address climate change. Will they be good managers or great leaders?
Unless the world acts quickly, the average temperature by 2090 will rise more than 2 degrees Celsius, and people will consume more energy and exacerbate the problem. More intense storms will cause more damage, driving up insurance rates. Rising sea levels will force 15 million Americans to leave their homes, and floods will swamp refineries and petrochemical plants along the Gulf Coast.
Global warming will cost the U.S. economy at least $280 billion a year by in 2090, well within the lifetime of children alive today. That’s the equivalent of the Great Recession of 2007 every single year, according to the report by dozens of scientists at 13 federal agencies.
Republican senators criticized the report’s forecasts, arguing that businesses will come up with unforeseeable technological solutions. The problem, though, is that companies that make their money producing greenhouse gases, and their political allies, are fighting efforts to control them.
The oil and gas industry has persuaded governments to roll back limits on emissions of methane, one of the most damaging greenhouse gases. The coal industry wants the administration to prop up their business. Plastics and petrochemical companies resist any calls to reduce emissions.
For these managers, short-term shareholder returns outweigh future risks to humanity.
A massive investment in research and development, though, could make a difference. And the private sector could lead the way in reducing emissions from air travel and shipping, and cement and steel production, according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
Huge profits await companies that develop advanced nuclear energy, long-duration energy storage, carbon capture and storage and zero-emission energy sources. But all those fields await business leaders to make sufficient investments and purchases.
On a more practical level, our descendants need business leaders to spend a little more to reduce their energy use, purchase more energy from clean sources and screen their business operations to reduce emissions and waste.
The short-term costs may be higher, but taking these steps will pay off in the long run. Our grandchildren will rank leaders who help bend the global warming curve as heroes.
Even with rapid technological change, energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie predicts the planet will still warm more than 2 degrees Celsius unless more is done.
“Political momentum will be crucial, and at present, climate leadership is lacking,” senior analyst David Brown wrote.
Only an overly privileged 72-year-old can get away with declaring he doesn’t believe what most of the world’s leaders and scientists accept as fact. And only someone obsessed with instant gratification and no desire for a legacy would behave so callously.