“Climate is not a sector or a vertical. It's the whole economy.” - Three Climate Leaders On Why Sustainability Is Good For Business.

What’s below is adapted from the opening remarks in the embedded video.

Just over two months ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released the third and final installment of its Sixth Assessment Report. And since the last Assessment Report in 2014, there has been undeniable progress. Looking back at the period beginning in 2010, there have been decreases of up to 85% in the cost of renewable energy sources like wind, solar and batteries.?

In similarly encouraging news, COP 26, held last fall, saw some of the strongest pledges yet on the part of world governments to cut greenhouse gas emissions and reduce the use of coal, advancing the global goals outlined in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Climate change is the existential threat of our time, and it seems, finally, like our leaders are paying attention.?

But haven’t we been here before? I was 18 and on the cusp of my high school graduation when An Inconvenient Truth, the popular documentary starring Al Gore, was released—and it was blindingly clear to my peers and I back then that climate change was the existential threat of our time, and that, finally, our leaders were paying attention. One quarter of carbon emissions in the entire history of humanity have been produced since the release of that movie, according to the CDIAC and Global Carbon Project. So, the most pertinent question is: what will be different this time? When, despite the aforementioned progress, UN Secretary General António Guterres called the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report “a file of shame, cataloging the empty pledges that put us firmly on track toward an unlivable world”??

The stakes could not be higher—but, by the same token, the opportunities for innovators dreaming of a decarbonized future have never been greater. How do we reconcile the advances in renewable energy with the glacial pace of bureaucracy? And how might leaders from both the public and private sectors work together to advance our global transition to clean energy in time??

To help us answer these questions and more, I was excited to introduce three such leaders for our first panel of the inaugural ‘Dreams and Details’ summit, held on May 5th and 6th.

Entitled “Sustainability Is Good For Business”, it featured Jim Hagemann Snabe, Chairman of Siemens, and former Chairman of Maersk and co-CEO of SAP; Murat Aktihanoglu, co-founder and Managing Director of Entrepreneur’s Roundtable Accelerator and Remarkable Ventures; and Signe Horn Rosted, CIO and IT Director at Energinet.?

Please see below to watch the entire panel and here for the transcript.

03:32: The role incumbent private institutions play in leading the transition to a decarbonized future.??

08:51: Whether or not there is an ‘excitement gap’ on the part of the venture community when it comes to investing in climate tech startups. And is this era different from the era of ‘Cleantech 1.0’ (2006-2011)?

15:51: The transition to a ‘greener’ season in the realm of public-private partnerships.

21:52: If the last twenty years meant that every company has become, on some level, a software company, then does that mean over the next twenty years every company will become a ‘climate’ company?

29:09: How early-stage firms can solve climate challenges, when this industry has historically been so capital intensive.?

36:43: Is the Russian invasion of Ukraine the ‘wake-up call’ world leaders need to reduce dependence on fossil fuels??

46:36: Dreams and Details for the future of our guests' organizations.??

If you enjoy this conversation, please see here for all other videos from our ‘Dreams and Details’ summit.