Excerpts extracted from the attached article:
Since the 1990s, climate change has become a fixation for rich-country politicians and elites. It emerged just as the world was witnessing the end of the Cold War. There was relative peace and trust around the globe, with widespread economic growth and swift progress against poverty.
Proponents of climate action eagerly advocated the goal of ending reliance on the very fossil fuels that had powered two centuries of astonishing growth. Sure, doing so would cost hundreds of trillions of dollars, but there would always be more growth.
What a naïve, narrow-minded world view! Time has not been kind to the foolish idea that climate change was humanity’s sole remaining problem — or that the planet would unite to solve it. Geopolitics and economics mean a rapid global transition from fossil fuels is impossible.
It has long been clear that most citizens of the world never shared this myopic focus on climate change.
Outside the most advanced economies, climate change has always — understandably — been a relatively low voter priority.
Leaders from Europe and the United States talk up “net zero” as though it has global support. But this unity is quickly revealed as a mirage. For one thing, the destabilizing axis of Russia, Iran and North Korea is not about to support western efforts to solve climate change.
The geopolitical challenges run even deeper. China’s growth has relied on burning ever more coal. It is now the world’s preeminent greenhouse gas emitter, with the largest increase of any nation last year.
Russia and its ilk will ignore the fixation on climate change altogether. And China will make money from selling the West solar panels and electric cars, while only modestly curbing its own emissions.
Many rich countries face pressure to spend more on defence, health care and infrastructure, as geopolitical pressures and changing demographics make stability and growth far less certain. Yet across Europe and North America single-minded zealots born in the relative calm of the 1990s continue to push for de-industrialization and immiseration to tackle climate change — including in the world’s emerging economies.
The world needs a better way forward. The best solution is not to push people to be worse off by forcing a premature transition from fossil fuels to inadequate green alternatives.
Rich countries need to wake up and stop hemorrhaging trillions of dollars in self-inflicted climate policies that will be followed by few and laughed at by many and will mainly serve to make China rich. Spending a small fraction of the climate trillions on green innovation would fix climate change and allow us to focus the rest of our resources on education, defence, health care and the many other important challenges of the 21st century.
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Real Estate Services Director
2moGlad to read this you don’t need a sustainability strategy but a business strategy with sustainability embedded in it!