Report: Rethinking Climate Change Report from RethinkX

A group of climate industry experts have written a report to highlight the new thinking required to address climate change;

https://www.rethinkx.com/implications

Key takeaways:

1.  The prevailing view of government and business leaders over the past 20 years is that decarbonization of the global economy was going to be expensive and meant lowering overall growth--we could reduce emissions but everyone had to agree to be a little bit poorer in the future

2.  This inaccurate prevailing view was the reason why the Copenhagen COP in 2009 failed--the last thing major governments where going to approve coming out of the Global Financial Crisis was a global decarbonization plan which would lower overall growth--regardless of the benefits of avoiding the damages from climate change

3.  This Report turns the prevailing view upside down by confirming:

A.  investing into global scale decarbonization does NOT lower global economic output--it increases it even without accounting for the avoidance of climate change damage costs

B.  investing into global scale decarbonization is an absolute requirement for improving global resource productivity and lifting growth to the higher levels now required--especially following the COVID-19 pandemic

C.  we have all the technology we need to achieve 90 percent of the challenging 2030 and 2050 carbon emissions reduction targets already operating at commerical scale worldwide--it is less a question of finding new breakthrough climate technologies but scaling what we already have

D. we will still need new technologies beyond what is already at place at commercial scale and most of these will focus on removing carbon from the atmosphere

E. investing into global scale decarbonization will be wildly disruptive of many global sectors including food, transport, and energy--the key is that we can leverage the power of disruption to scale quickly

F.  changes in policy and regulations will be criticial to allow the full force of disruption to drive decarbonization at scale in the food, transport, and energy sectors

‍