My mother grew up with Christmas being a spartan time. For me, she was determined to do the opposite. We had an abundance of festive cheer, and I always had a pile of presents under the tree. Probably my most memorable gift was the Millennium Falcon.
It was the signature piece from the Star Wars series and a gateway into a world of lightsabers, space, a worrywart robot named C-3PO and the mysterious force, described by Obi-Wan Kenobi as “an energy field created by all living things.” It served as a sort of connective tissue for all living things and could be tapped into for dark or light purposes.
I couldn’t help but notice the parallels at this year’s annual UN Climate Change Conference, COP28, when the CEO of ExxonMobil, Darren Woods, descended upon the discussions for the first time since they started holding them in 1995. Woods had a message to share: UN climate talks “put way too much emphasis on getting rid of fossil fuels, oil and gas and not . . . on dealing with the emissions associated with them.” This was hard to square with what UN Secretary-General António Guterres was saying, namely that ending fossil fuel use is the only way to save a burning planet.
In the end, world leaders agreed to a roadmap that zeroed in on fossil fuels and the necessity of “transitioning away” from them “in our energy systems in a just, orderly and equitable manner.” This was historic and insufficient, as the chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, Tzeporah Berman, put it. It was historic because for the first time in 28 UN climate summits, the enemy of a safe climate was specifically called out. And it was insufficient because there was no commitment to an outright phaseout of fossil fuels, like the world successfully did in the 1980s with chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) to stop the destruction of the ozone layer. It was also insufficient because the renewable projects required to transform our energy system are still largely underfunded.
Canada’s former central bank governor, Mark Carney, noted that this transition will require US$200 trillion of funds between now and 2050. That works out to about US$7 trillion a year, or triple what we are currently doing. This is not an impossible lift for a global economy that generates US$100 trillion a year of gross domestic product.
Everyone from conservatives to liberals – whatever those terms mean these days – should be able to agree that directing less than a 10th of our income to save the only home we have is not a bad deal.
But we are going to need a healthy dose of Luke Skywalkers to take on the desperate imperial fossil fuel forces, who still harbour astounding mind-bending abilities.
Anything is possible in politics, which can be a good thing in a time that requires change. It can also get wild, fast. A former guerrilla fighter, Gustavo Petro, is now running Colombia, whose economy is marinated in fossil fuel wealth, and has pledged to ditch fossil fuels and focus on stewarding Colombia’s “biological wealth.” In Argentina, a fellow G20 country, a former tantric sex guru, Javier Milei, is now head of state, and he is calling climate change a “socialist lie.”
See what I mean by wild? This is why we need business leaders not just to follow but to boldly guide the way forward to a new clean energy economy. The small-minded excuses around fiduciary constraints and short-term shareholders are, as Elon Musk has shown, a bunch of hooey.
We need more business leaders going all in to put climate solutions at the heart of their expansion plans. We need them to provide some guardrails for volatile political leaders, and we need them to speak up, and speak up loudly, for a more sustainable future, as Ralph Nader suggests.
In 2022, according to BloombergNEF, clean energy investments surged to US$1.1 trillion, growing at a three-year annualized clip of 29%. At this rate, by the end of this decade, we will exceed the US$7 trillion we need to be deploying.
But I don’t think the forces of darkness are going down without a fight, and they still have a few tricks up their sleeves. So here is a call to all business leaders on the right side of history in this struggle: may the force be with you.
Toby Heaps is co-founder and publisher of Corporate Knights.
