Say Goodbye to 1.5˚C
6 years, 8 months, 3 days, 2 hours
19 November 2022
‘Say goodbye to 1.5˚C’ proclaimed the headline of The Economist a few weeks back.
So vexed was I, that I found myself, before even reading the article, rehearsing the arguments I would deploy here for why abandoning 1.5˚ was an unconscionable idea. A bit like deciding to let your friend drown because someone tells you it is probably too late to save them.
But when I read the leader, and the supporting report, I found to my surprise that its main thrust was not a call to abandon 1.5˚ (though it does say it is a lost cause and hence unrealistic to plan against) but rather to castigate everyone for the yawning gap between the ambition and the action taken to realise it. And then to call for a huge increase in the money being thrown at solutions, a realism that fossil fuels can’t be eliminated overnight, and a lot more focus on climate adaption to protect both assets and communities.
One sentence in the leader jumped out at me. ‘So the governments of developing countries, especially middle-income ones, will have to work with the rich world to mobilise private investment’.
A few days later in the second week of COP27, KPMG published Financing Charging Infrastructure which summarises the insight from five regional dialogues (in North America, LATAM, Europe, Africa and ASEAN), that KPMG colleagues organised in collaboration with the WBCSD (World Business Council for Sustainable Development), bringing together representatives of the public sector, corporates and finance providers, to discuss how to accelerate the transition to Zero Emission Vehicles (ZEVs).
The challenge s a perfect example of the dilemma discussed by The Economist. Rising prosperity in emerging markets is expected to double their demand for vehicles over the period to 2050 (and quadruple in sub-Saharan Africa). Yet numerous constraints make it much harder to ignite in these regions the exponential growth in ZEV demand now being seen in Europe. An exacerbating factor I have long worried about is the likelihood that all the rich world’s existing petrol and diesel vehicles end up being dumped in emerging markets, undercutting the growing cost competitiveness of ZEVs.
In an attempt to address this, the US and UK governments announced at COP the ZEV-Emerging Markets initiative. That provides for more intensive public-private dialogues, country by country, starting with India, with the aim of concluding a series of concrete agreements by the time of COP28. 11 private sector organisations have signed up to make this happen, including KPMG.