The New Normal?
4 years, 6 months, 4 days, 17 hours
18 January 2025
‘We are heading back to the law of the jungle. A world where the strongest do what they can, while the weakest are condemned to suffer what they must… it's not a sustainable trajectory’.
Ian Bremmer was not in a happy place last New Year so I wasn’t surprised at his verdict going into 2025. It is hard to disagree with him.
But as I read slowly though Eurasia Group's Top 10 risks I kept thinking ‘where is the one on climate?’ And by the time I had got to number 10, it still hadn’t featured. And then I read further and to my surprise, in the very last paragraph of the section on ‘red herrings’ is global energy transition. And it seems Ian is in the same camp that I argued some months ago that that market fundamentals of that transition are so well baked-in now, that we aren’t about to go backwards.
I felt a little comforted. But it didn’t last long. Colleague Minh Dao GAICD sent me a piece from The Australian Financial Review covering the suspension of the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative, with the reasons given included the US election result and ‘different regulatory and client expectations’. The withdrawal of various, mostly US, financial institutions from the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) that has triggered its restructuring, reflects the same depressing pattern. At a meeting with the EBRD this week, specifically with the team that interfaces with financial institutions, there was no panic. They saw it as just public positioning more than reflective of fundamental changes in strategy.
Maybe. But even if that is true, I worry. I worry that if some of our biggest commercial organisations are so craven to political winds that they cease to say what they believe, they set a precedent, an expectation, a new normal. When one politician finds they can say with impunity whatever they like, without the slightest degree of interest in whether it is true, so that becomes acceptable for everyone else. When one social media mogul can use their extraordinary reach to make wild demands in the affairs of other countries, it encourages others. And wait until we turbo-charge all that lack of care for truth with the power of AI.