The prophets of ecological doom commit the same mistake time and again: they underestimate the imagination of mankind. The number of atoms is limited, but the number of their combinations is infinite. It is not about limiting growth, what counts is innovation.
Previously on Environment:
Tesla has single-handedly transformed the landscape of the automobile industry worldwide in less than two decades. Before it, almost no car companies were seriously invested in developing all-electric vehicles (EVs).
Most people assume that ESG Investing is designed to reward companies that are helping the planet. In fact, ESG ratings which underlie ESG fund selection are based on “single materiality” — the impact of the changing world on a company P&L, not the reverse. Asset management firms have been happy to let the confusion go uncorrected — ESG funds are highly popular and come with higher management fees. The danger with ESG investing is that it might convince policy makers that the market can solve major societal challenges such as climate change — when in fact only government intervention can help the planet avoid a climate catastrophe
Crucially, the burden brought by radiation at Chernobyl is less severe than the benefits reaped from humans leaving the area. Now essentially one of Europe’s largest nature preserves, the ecosystem around the wrecked power plant supports more life than before, even if each individual cycle of that life lasts a little less. In a way, the Chernobyl disaster reveals the true extent of our environmental impact on the planet. Harmful as it was, the nuclear accident was far less destructive to the local ecosystem than we were. In driving ourselves away from the area, we have created space for nature to return.
MSCI, the largest ESG rating company, doesn’t even try to measure the impact of a corporation on the world. It’s all about whether the world might mess with the bottom line.
NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, use satellites to observe sea ice extent. Over the past several decades, Arctic sea ice extent has been steeply declining year-round, especially in late summer when it reaches its minimum for the year. Sea ice forms in the cold winter months, when seawater freezes into massive blocks of floating ice, then partially melts away in the warm summer months. This cycle repeats every year.
Green chemistry cannot solve all our environmental challenges, but it provides all the qualities of technology innovation that we come to expect in our modern lives but without the chemical pollution – and makes both environmental and business sense.
Landmark United Nations-backed report finds that agriculture is one of the biggest threats to Earth’s ecosystems.
How Business Ecosystems Can Enable Collective Action Against Climate Change
The question that got thrown back at me was: Is there a technology or a set of them that can actually save the world? I will stick my neck out and say there is: Fusion energy.
This progress each company makes toward managing its “Carbon Short” should be reported on a quarterly basis during the earnings call. Yes, companies must have a long-term plan for covering their carbon short by being net-zero by 2050, but they should provide short-term updates on the risks they face and the progress they’re making on their plan. It’s no longer the next CEO’s job.
Many people still think of climate change as a phenomenon that we will only face in the distant future. Perhaps that’s partly because climate change projections about rising temperatures and extreme weather events are tied to future dates: 2030, 2050, or 2100, for instance.
THE ROMANS perfected concrete, and their legacy still stands in the form of the magnificent roof of the Pantheon, the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome. Since it was completed in around 125AD by the Emperor Hadrian, an awful lot more concrete has been poured—some 30bn tonnes every year, at the moment, to put up buildings, roads, bridges, dams and other structures.
Most adults around me vote for politicians who support measures to mitigate climate change. Some even consider themselves climate activists. But they order online for next-day delivery with abandon and buy their children endless bubble teas with giant plastic straws that seem almost wilfully designed to fit neatly into a dolphin blowhole. Then they usher them into emission-belching, six-cylinder vehicles to country homes in those rural areas where the soil or water table hasn’t been adulterated by chemicals from industry past and present.
High-level discussion of the energy transition that is needed for a fossil-fuel-free world tends to take the physicists’ view: watt is a watt is a watt. Watts associated with carbon emissions simply need to be replaced by watts that are not. Looking at the 19th-century Industrial Revolution that this 21st-century transition seeks to reverse, though, suggests that things may be a bit more complicated than this
The world’s coastlines are turning to concrete, at a huge cost to wildlife and the climate. But new technologies may offer a way to shore up coasts while benefiting biodiversity.
First Vuna salad was added to the menu, now Vrimp is on there too as the world’s biggest food company capitalises on the growth of vegan and vegetarian diets with a new faux-seafood product.
