Advertisement
Macroscope | Climate change: a Marshall Plan is needed to curb emissions and avert disaster
- Climate change should figure as large as the US$15 billion Marshall Plan enacted by the US to help rebuild a war-shattered Europe
- But there is no such plan, only a naive reliance on private-sector initiatives. It cannot be left to markets to decide how trillions in savings should be deployed against climate change
Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
1
A sense of impotence would be an understandable reaction to the latest UN report on climate change suggesting that it is too late now to hold the pernicious process of global warming in check to an extent that a few years ago seemed possible. But rage and demand for action are what is needed.
According to the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Earth’s average temperature will hit 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels less than two decades from now, generating more calamitous changes in weather patterns of the kind we’ve already begun to see.
It’s time – well past time in fact – to drop the pretence that climate change can be controlled through voluntary carbon dioxide emission reduction targets or by “going green” (whatever that means). And it’s time to abandon the fiction that concerted actions on so-called ESG investment can save us.
Advertisement
Depending upon how you define it, environmental, social and governance-based investment has already attracted up to US$30 trillion of savings into investor funds of one kind or another, generating handsome commissions for asset managers and brokers in the process.
We are not going to hear them admit that ESG is a distraction or sideshow in the battle to save Earth and its inhabitants from (not so) slow extinction. Someone needs to shout from the rooftops that it’s time to get real about climate change and how to finance the fight against it.
01:53
Grim warning for Hong Kong as UN releases major report on climate crisis
Grim warning for Hong Kong as UN releases major report on climate crisis
The only person who has come anywhere near to doing that is Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who told the world’s financial elite at the World Economic Forum in 2019 to stop voicing pious hopes of overcoming climate change and to “panic” instead – to behave “as if our house is on fire”.
Advertisement
Select Voice
Choose your listening speed
Get through articles 2x faster
1.25x
250 WPM
Slow
Average
Fast
1.25x