The Climate Reality Leadership Corps — LA 2018
The 2018 Climate Reality Leadership Corps saw 2,200 delegates invited from 70 countries go to Los Angeles for three days of training. Delegates learned directly from Vice President Gore and a lineup of renowned climate scientists on how to inspire action and lead our communities in fighting for a sustainable future powered by clean energy.
The training’s wide-ranging sessions explored how participants can raise public awareness of the climate crisis, build support for the practical solutions in our hands today, and pressure government leaders to act.
The Leadership Corps programme has trained more than 14,000 activists working in 141 countries. Recent training summits have been held in Mexico City; Pittsburgh; Seattle; Denver; Shenzhen; Manila; Miami; Toronto; New Delhi; and Rio de Janeiro.
I had the immense privilege and pleasure to attend the Climate Reality Leadership Corps Training in Los Angeles, USA. I attended as a Global Shaper, a network of young professionals organised by the World Economic Forum to create impactful initiatives in our communities. Among the 2,200 delegates, there were 70 other Global Shapers.
During the opening keynote address, Al Gore set the scene by showing the audience a photograph taken on Christmas Eve 1968, during the Apollo 8 mission. Astronaut Bill Anders took the photograph which became known as “Earthrise”. It was the first-ever colour photograph of planet Earth. Gore explained why “Earthrise” is still considered one of the most influential pictures ever taken. It was the first time man truly saw itself from a distance. The Earth in its surrounding dark emptiness not only seemed infinitely beautiful, but it also seemed infinitely fragile. It illustrated our planet’s vulnerability. Gore believes the photograph sparked the first wave of environmentalists.
Fifty years on, we live in increasingly divided times where nationalism and identity politics are on the rise once again. Gore made it clear, climate change is indiscriminate. Regardless of your faith, ideology or beliefs, we are all in the line of fire as the planet heats up to the point of no return.
From Seattle to Siberia this summer, flames have consumed swathes of the northern hemisphere. One of 18 wildfires currently sweeping through California, among the worst in the state’s history, is generating such heat that it created its own weather system. Fires that raged through a coastal area near Athens killed 91. Elsewhere people are suffocating in the heat. Over 125 have died in Japan and 57,000 were submitted to hospital as the result of a heatwave that pushed temperatures in Tokyo above 40°C for the first time.
Such calamities, once considered freakish, are now commonplace. The world has warmed more than one degree Celsius since the industrial age’s first furnaces were lit. Gore ran through over 500 slides many of which highlighted how climate change is having an impact on everything from food production to the spread of disease to mental health. Gore showed how climate change contributed to the civil war in Syria and how it will likely lead to further conflict. In addition to illustrating how climate change promotes wealth inequality, creates extreme weather patterns, causes the extinction of species and so much more.
As the impact of climate change becomes more evident, so too does the scale of the challenge ahead. Three years after countries vowed in Paris to keep warming “well below” 2°C relative to pre-industrial levels, greenhouse-gas emissions are up again. The odds of achieving targets set out in the Paris Agreement, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20.
James Hansen, Former Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, called two-degree warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.” A long-term disaster now looks to be the best-case scenario. Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: imagine forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on climate change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. Four degrees would see Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China and India claimed by desert and Pacific Island nations swallowed by the sea. The prospect of five-degree warming has prompted some of the world’s leading climate scientists to warn of the end of human civilisation.
Conveying hard-to-visualise issues is always a challenge but Gore does so with ease. Powerful statistics and analogies are littered throughout his now famous slide deck. For example, Earth’s staggering rate of heat build-up from human-caused global warming is the equivalent of exploding 400,000 atomic bombs per day, 365 days per year. Although I preferred Gore’s quote on how “every night on the TV is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation.”
Gore went on to show how 17 of the 18 hottest years on record have occurred since 2001. Whilst 2017 was the 41st consecutive year with a global temperature above the 20th-century average. Furthermore, the temperature at the North Pole was 28°C hotter than normal in February this year as a result of the polar vortex splitting in two which brought bitter cold snaps to North America and Europe and record warmth to the Arctic. In 2017, overall losses from weather-related disasters totalled $320 billion. Climate change is not tomorrow’s problem but today’s reality.
What surprised me most, is that nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979, a decade before I was born. By that year, data collected since 1957 confirmed what had been known since before the turn of the 20th century: Human beings have altered Earth’s atmosphere through the indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels. As a species, we worry about the future. But how much, exactly? The answer, as any economist could tell you, is very little. Economics, the science of assigning value to human behaviour, prices the future at a discount; the farther out you project, the cheaper the consequences. This makes the climate problem the perfect economic disaster.
Western countries grew wealthy on a carbon-heavy diet of industrial development. Steel, cement, farming, transport and other forms of economic activity account for over half of global carbon emissions. They are technically harder to clean up than power generation and are protected by vested industrial interests. It is high time to recognise the devastating impact of inaction. The World Bank has warned that rising temperatures and changing monsoons could cost India 2.8% of GDP per person by 2050. The global cost of productivity lost to heat has been estimated at $2trn by 2030.
After 90 minutes Gore then changed tact to show, the now distressed delegates, that all is not lost. Equally powerful statistics and technology restore faith that there is a way out of this catastrophe. Gore explains how there is enough solar energy reaching earth every hour to fill the world’s energy needs for a full year. And how globally, wind could supply worldwide electricity consumption 40x over. Gore talked about how we are at a point similar to the 1980s with mobile phone use. AT&T projected there would be 900,000 mobile phone users in the US by 2000. It was actually 120x higher. The contributing principles of that growth also apply to renewable energy. As costs are dropping whilst quality is improving and low-income nations are leapfrogging fossil fuels and going straight to renewable. Just as they did with mobile phone use over landlines.
Wind and Solar are now growing faster than any other energy source and their falling costs are making them competitive with fossil fuels. BP expects renewables to account for half of the growth in the global energy supply over the next 20 years. It is no longer far-fetched to think that the world is entering an era of clean, unlimited and cheap power.
There is a $20 trillion hitch, though. To get from here to there requires huge amounts of investment, to replace old power plants and to upgrade the pylons and wires that bring electricity to consumers. Investors like putting their money into electricity because it offers reliable returns. Yet green energy has a dirty secret. The more it is deployed, the more it lowers the price of power from any source. That makes it hard to manage the transition to a carbon-free future, during which many generating technologies, clean and dirty, need to remain profitable if the lights are to stay on. In parts of Europe and China, investment in renewables is slowing as subsidies are cut back. However, the solution is not less wind and solar. It is to rethink how the world prices clean energy in order to make better use of it.
Therefore, the task is to redesign power markets to reflect the new need for flexible supply and demand. Prices should adjust more frequently, to reflect the fluctuations of the weather. At times of extreme scarcity, a high fixed price could kick in to prevent blackouts. Markets should reward those willing to use less electricity to balance the grid, just as they reward those who generate more of it. Bills could be structured to be higher or lower depending on how strongly a customer wanted guaranteed power all the time — a bit like an insurance policy. In short, policymakers should be clear they have a problem and that the cause is not renewable energy, but the out-of-date system of electricity pricing.
Gore goes into equal detail on the lunacy of the Trump Administration essentially turning the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) into the “Coal Production Agency” and stresses the President needs to be aware of simple facts such as there being twice as many jobs in solar in the US when compared to coal mining.
Some further impressive insights Gore shared showed how last year the number of electric cars sold around the world passed 1m and how Shanghai and Shenzhen are now only buying electric buses. Consequently, half of the world’s buses will be electric by 2025.
Ireland will soon become the first country in the world to fully divest from fossil fuels. It is however worth noting that while green fund managers threaten to pull back from oil companies, state-owned behemoths in the Middle East and Russia see Asian demand as a compelling reason to invest.
The world is not short of ideas on how to fight climate change. Around 70 countries or regions, responsible for one-fifth of all emissions, now price carbon. As technologists beaver away on sturdier grids, zero-carbon steel, even carbon-negative cement, whose production absorbs more CO2 than it releases. All these efforts and more — including research into “solar geoengineering” to reflect sunlight back into space — should be redoubled. Averting climate change will come at a short-term financial cost — although the shift from carbon may eventually enrich the economy, as the move to carbon-burning cars, lorries and electricity did in the 20th century. The West must honour their commitments in the Paris agreement to help poorer places both adapt to a warmer Earth and also abate future emissions without sacrificing the growth needed to leave poverty behind.
It is evident that we must change and it appears we have the ability to change with carbon taxes, increased investment in renewable and nuclear energy and decarbonisation technology. From a technology and economics standpoint, it is still possible to stay under two degrees Celsius. We can trust the technology and the economics. It’s harder to trust human nature. Keeping the planet to two degrees of warming will require transformative action. It will take more than good work and voluntary commitments; it will take a revolution. But in order to become a revolutionary, you need first to suffer. How much more will we need to suffer before we take action?
Human nature has brought us to this place; perhaps human nature will one day bring us through. It is time for us to use our voice, our vote and our decisions to turn the tide on the single biggest risk to mankind.
