Special Edition – The Countdown to COP26

The Countdown is on!

This week, I was honored to participate in the TED Countdown to COP meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland. First, it was just nice to get out of the house and have some actual human interaction. The TED folks handled it beautifully by making sure all attendees were vaccinated and tested. And with a safe space in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, the event attracted a very high-caliber audience resulting a truly inspiring experience.?

Al Gore, Rainn Wilson, Emma Watson, John Doerr, David Lammy, Nicola Sturgeon, Dan J?rgensen, Christiana Figueres, Nili Gilbert and so many more spoke with passion and commitment to solve the climate crisis. Perhaps one of the more poignant and disturbing moments came when Ben van Beurden (the CEO of Royal Dutch Shell) sat down with Chris James (the founder of Engine One who took on Exxon Mobil in a proxy fight and won) and Scottish climate activist Lauren McDonald.?

Credit to Mr. van Beurden for showing up to an event where he knew he would be criticized.?And criticized he was.?When Ms. McDonald spoke, she looked him in the eyes and said she was disgusted to be stage with Mr. van Beurden and then, after some tears and a few more choice words, took off her microphone and left as protesters made their way down the aisles with banners and signs.?

Moderator and climate scientist Christiana Figueres did a masterful job of getting the event back on track.?Once things settled down, the approach to working with oil and gas companies outlined by Chris James of Engine One was brilliant.?Speaking in the language of business, he articulated how many of the oil and gas companies have underestimated the impacts of the climate crisis to their business model and how it has damaged shareholder value.?He summed it up well when he said that Exxon Mobil’s strategy was based on the hope that society’s goals would fail.?And if society fails, it gets a lot harder to sell oil and gas.?

There was much more to the meeting than this event, but it was a defining moment not just for its drama, but for the clarity it brought to the transition ahead of us.?For his part, Ben van Beurden did an excellent job of describing the realities of running a fossil fuel business while actively transitioning to a low-carbon energy provider.?Suffice it to say, it is hard.?But I, for one, believe that the oil and gas sector must be engaged in the process – they have the expertise and capital needed.?Mr. James summarized his engagement approach by saying: if we don’t work together, we make it someone else’s problem and that won’t work.

Like the World Economic Forum in Davos, TED is a very “talent dense” experience.?Unlike past TED events, this one was entirely focused on the climate crisis.?And, when all was said and done, I left with new hope and optimism.?No topics were left off the table and, when added all together, the impression is that industry, innovators, investors and civil society are aligning (for the most part) to solve the problem.?It felt more action-oriented than the typical gab fest.

Now it is up to the policymakers who will be in Glasgow in just two weeks.?The Washington Post reported about the pressures on President Biden as he prepares to bring back US leadership to the climate talks while simultaneously coping with fractious Democrats to pass?his two vast infrastructure packages that include his climate agenda.

Biden has a full agenda: He will first meet with the leaders of G20 nations in Rome, have an audience with the Pope—who joined with other religious leaders to call for action on climate change—and then head to the Glasgow climate talks.?

The Biden administration has pledged to?slash U.S. greenhouse gas emissions?by half by 2030, almost double the original U.S. commitment in the 2015 Paris climate accord. And, the administration is not waiting for Congress to act: the EPA will push ahead with “a robust greenhouse gas rule for power plants, a stringent methane rule for oil and gas infrastructure, and sweeping emissions standards for new cars, regardless of Congress's actions.”

Update as of October 15th: The WH Report on Climate-Related Financial Risk was released today.?The first of the six main pillers? "Promoting the resilience of the U.S. financial system to climate-related financial risks"

Meanwhile,?at least 85 percent of the world’s population?has endured weather events exacerbated by climate change, citing according to new research published in the journal?Nature Climate Change. “After using machine learning to analyze and map more than 100,000 studies of events that could be linked to global warming, researchers paired the analysis with a well-established data set of temperature and precipitation shifts caused by fossil fuel use and other sources of carbon emissions.

Thank you for reading, sharing, and subscribing! Below are a few more top headlines that may be of interest:

• This week, The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) published its 2021 Status Report that indicates a significant increase in the number of companies reporting on climate-related risk. TCFD also shared new guidance on the application of the recommendations, including disclosure on companies’ plans to transition to a net zero economy.
• As more companies and governments declare commitments to reducing carbon footprints, TechCrunch reports the climate technology startups that are drawing heightened interest from investors, including my company Persefoni.
• New guidance from Goldman Sachs and BlackRock on portfolio alignment seeks to help track whether banks and asset managers are following through on their pledges to decarbonize their portfolios in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement.
• ?Reuters covers a recent report by asset manager BlackRock that finds emerging market economies need $1 trillion a year of public and private finance in order to transition to a low-carbon economy in the fight against climate change.
• Responsible Investor reports the US Department of Labor unveils plans to ditch Trump-era rules that limit how workplace pensions can address ESG issues