by Mary Bruno
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Mary: Hello and
welcome to Grist Talks, our regular series of conversations with really smart
people about really interesting topics. I’m Mary Bruno your really smart and interesting host. And I’m joined today by really smart and really
interesting panelists. But before I bring them into the conversation, let me
first introduce today’s topic.
On January 27th, commissioners at the U.S.
Securities and Exchange Commission decided in a close 3-2 vote that publicly
traded companies really ought to disclose any climate change-related risks and
opportunities that might affect their bottom line. So for example, do ski
resorts have a plan for dealing with warmer, dryer winters? Have insurance
companies calculated the budget impacts of more severe weather or a rise in sea
level? Has the healthcare industry prepared for an expansion of certain viruses
and bacteria? Inquiring, responsible investors needed to know, hence the SEC’s
vote, and I quote “to prove public companies with interpretive guidance on
existing SEC disclosure requirements as the apply to business or legal
developments relating to the issue of climate change.”
So what does it all
mean? That’s why we’re here today.
We’re going to be talking about impact
of this “interpretive guidance” on day-to-day corporate practices and on the
U.S. economy in general. But we’ll also be looking at the impact of the SEC
decision on climate change itself. Could it, for instance, mark a turning point
in the struggle to arrest climate change? Could these new SEC guidelines give
corporate America, and maybe the rest of us too, a little nudge, maybe a shove,
to start thinking and planning for the long term? If so, it would be an
immense, an important cultural shift. Because let’s face it, the ability to think ahead—way, way, way,
ahead—is an obvious first step in tackling a problem as complex and
multi-generational as climate change.
So with that, I am very pleased to welcome our three
panelists:
Investor, Julie Gorte, Senior Vice President for Sustainable Investing
at New Hampshire based Pax World Management Corporation, which, if you don’t
know, was the first socially responsible investment firm in the U.S.;
Economist, Kristen Sheeran, Executive
Director of the Economics for Equity and the Environmental, or E3 Network, in
Portland, Ore., and co-author of the book, Saving Kyoto;
And futurist, Sara
Robinson, a fellow at both the Campaign for America’s Future and The
Commonwill Institute, which are located in Washington D.C. and San Francisco,
respectively.
It’s a great pleasure to
have you all with us today. Julie Gorte, let’s start with you.
Investors have been pushing the SEC for some kind of leadership or
direction on corporate disclosure of climate-related risks, for 10 years,
right? So why is this issue so important to investors? Why, if it is so
important to investors, has it taken so long to get some action? And while you’re
answering those questions, can you also describe for us who and how the
investment community has been lobbying all this time?
Julie: The most proximate answer to that
who and how question is that there were 22 of us that petitioned the SEC
in September of 2007 to issue this guidance. And those petitioners included the treasurers, controllers, or financial officials
representing California, Florida, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, New
York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Vermont. There were also two
asset managers, including my firm Pax, and three nonprofits that joined in this
petition.
This was not the first time that the SEC had heard that
we wanted some more interpretive
guidance or action on climate change. We’d been saying so for quite some time.
The Investor Network on Climate Risk, which includes all of the above mentioned
entities as well as many more asset managers and asset owners, was formed in
2001. Part of our platform right from the start was that we
needed some public sector action, including guidance or action on the reporting of
climate change risks and opportunities. If I go back a
decade, there were very few
in the investment community that paid attention to it accept in the socially
responsible investment world. In the years since 2001, the investment community has become much more interested in and aware of climate change.
There was a
report in the early 2000s from the Association of British Insurers noting that
the damages, or losses—insured losses—from severe weather had doubled and
tripled over the previous two-to-three year period, and that they were expected
to continue to rise on a rather dramatic scale as a result of climate
change. So when the insurers get concerned, because that absolutely is their bottom line, a lot of other investors started
paying attention.
Now we’re seeing reports from all the mainstream analysts that provide research to everybody else
in the financial community—you know, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Societe
General—covering climate
change, originally just with respect to the big emitters like utilities and
energy companies, but then sort of branching out and saying “well, here’s how
it could effect this sector or that sector.” And pretty soon it got to the
point where we recognized that there are no sectors, really, that don’t have to think about climate change.
You mentioned health
care companies and the expanding landscape of morbidity and mortality. You’ve got Bell South with I don’t know how many thousands of
wires strung all over the hurricane alley down in the South. So, what we’re
really seeing in investment is that the consciousness of climate change as a
financial issue has increased, and is still increasing, and I think that was part
of the critical mass that led to the SEC issuing this guideline.
Mary: So no
sector left behind-I like that. Publicly-traded companies are already required to report anything considered “material”
to their investors. So, why did
it take so long? Why was it so difficult to convince the SEC on climate-change
related risks and benefits? Were there certain stumbling blocks? And what or
who finally made the SEC take action?
Julie: Well, the
SEC is kind of like a super-tanker: it doesn’t turn on a dime, and it probably
shouldn’t. I think it does wait for issues to reach the level of concern or
consciousness among a significant number of financial institutions before it acts.
And that’s true of a lot of public policy. There was also an election, if you remember, a couple years ago that changed
the makeup of all the executive [branch of government], including the SEC. So, we did have sort of a political
change in America, as well as a rising tide of investor concern and sentiment
regarding the materiality of climate change.
Mary: So, there has been this growing awareness on the part of the investment community that
climate change was an issue that was material to the success
of the businesses they were thinking of investing in. Has that awareness
and urgency, before the SEC ruling at least, spilled out at all into the
corporate community? Or is it just investors that are on board with this?
Julie: Oh, no.
[Awareness and urgency] has been growing in the corporate community as well. The financial
community is just kind of a mirror of the rest of society in many ways. So, if go back, for example, to 1997 to the third conference of the parties
in Kyoto that resulted in the Kyoto Protocol, you could probably have used one
hand to count the number of companies that actually reported anything with
respect to climate change publicly. That would have included B.P. and Shell and a couple of other leaders, not
too many. Since then, we’ve seen the insurance and reinsurance industries
really start to run the bases on this issue, partly
because they have to; they have long-term liability with respect to storms and fires
and floods and droughts. A lot of the companies that were
big emitters were aware, even back in 2000, that at
some point, and certainly in 2005 when the Kyoto Protocol entered into force, [that they’d have to take account of climate change]. The awareness among U.S.
companies was, “well, we may not have a law right now but there probably will
be one someday and we should probably get ready to see what our liabilities
are.”
Mary: Kristen, do
you have anything to add to that?
Kristen: Sure. There’s this misperception amongst many that corporate America is
opposed to actions that would deal with the climate change problem head on, and
it’s simply just not the case. With the exception of the fossil-fuel industry
and a few others who have very vocally opposed any pro-active measures in the
U.S. to deal with climate change threats, most of corporate America realizes
that the greatest risks of climate change come from its physical impact rather than
from regulations per se. Whether you’re talking about big companies like
Microsoft, Nike, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, these are just a few examples of
businesses that have come out and openly supported immediate and aggressive
actions to prevent climate change and have lobbied Congress in that regard.
What business hates most is uncertainty. Business in America has been
asking our elected leaders for clear and consistent rules, and clear and
consistent pricing over carbon so they can plan ahead effectively.
Mary: Clarity-it’s
what we all need right?
Kristen: Clarity
and certainty.
Mary: Julie, let
me get back to you for a couple of quick questions. So the SEC action isn’t a
law, right?
Julie: That is
correct.
Mary: So, will it
be enforced? How does it get enforced? Can companies just choose to ignore it
if they want to?
Julie: They can [choose to ignore it],
yes. The law says that companies must report material actions to their
investors. You ask any corporate lawyer what materiality means and
they’ll say, “well, I can give you a long definition, but the short one is
nailing jelly to a wall.” There’s always some doubt as to what materiality is,
or what an investor would consider material, and the SEC has always resisted
setting a numeric threshold: it’s not 5% of your earnings or your assets or
something, although that’s often used as a rule of thumb.
The SEC has been
issuing guidance on the reporting of environmental liability for over thirty
years now, so they’ve done this before. You know, if you have big Superfund
cleanup liabilities, or asbestos liabilities, or something like that, you’re expected to
say so to your investors. So what this SEC guidance does, is basically signals that the SEC sees climate change as something that could
have a material impact on a sufficiently large number of publicly-traded
companies that it’s worth considering in its own right. How would it be enforced? It would be
enforced pretty much after the fact. If, for example, we had a coal company
that decided that climate change wasn’t material, and then we got a law that
significantly limited emissions and established a carbon-trading regime and the
stocks of the coal company fell 25%, that company’s investors could come back and lodge
a securities fraud lawsuit and say ‘you should have told us about this and you
didn’t.’
Mary: Let me move
to you Kristen. Were economists also out there lobbying or arguing for some
sort of regulatory change? Do economists lobby?
Kristen: Economists, in general, tend to be very apolitical. But economists, especially
those involved in the E3 network, have become increasingly vocal in warning
that the economic damages from climate change will be significant, and that
immediate and significant investments in things like reductions in energy
efficiency and renewables will make good economic sense, especially when you
compare those actions to the potential costs of inaction. There’s something that Julie
just said that I really want to underscore. This ruling really demonstrates
that the SEC, and the private sector more generally perhaps, is a lot further
ahead than our own government at this point in really coming to terms
with both the risks and opportunities present in the climate crisis. From
an economics perspective, getting businesses to recognize and systematically
account for the implications of climate change is important. But what
economists more generally are lobbying for is a more broad-based and consistent policy
framework that could help provide the right incentives to these businesses to
make those changes.
Mary: Is there consensus about
what impact the SEC ruling will actually have on day-to-day corporate business
practices and operations? Is it just going to mean longer annual reports? What’s
going to happen?
Kristen: It’s
hard to say what impact this specific ruling will have. But I think it’s safe
to say that there’s no doubt that climate change, and the realities of
grappling with climate change, are going to change business as usual in
America. Planning for climate change, by definition, means planning for the
long term. It means having different attitudes and practices with regards to
risk and the environment. One thing we’ll see coming out of this is that firms
will no longer be able to relegate the environment to an afterthought.
Sustainability, it’s clear, is no longer about marketing green products to your
high-end consumer, or making sure that your workplace is more
resource-efficient, or being civic-minded; it’s about being smart and strategic
over the long-term. What we’re starting to see with this SEC decision is
the elevating of long-term environmental concerns to the same realm as things like
labor and capital to decision-making. This shift has been a long time in the
making because long-term environmental concerns have been relegated to the back
burner for quite some time.
Mary: Julie, how
do think this SEC action is going to affect investment decisions at Pax’s World
and other, maybe, more or less “enlightened” firms? And do you want to
speculate quickly about what impact you think it might have on the corporate
community and the economy in general.
Julie: One of the things that the financial market is not at all short on is
ego. There are a lot of people in finance who are basically born on third base
and go through life thinking they hit a triple. And if they don’t know
something, it is, by definition, not important. And what they know is what
companies report to them. If you give them information on a lot of companies, they will find a way to do really interesting things with it. What this will do is increase the trend of raised awareness toward climate
change. Once that awareness is raised, investors start to act on that
information. They say, ‘if you’re in this sector and aren’t aware of climate change, we
don’t think you’re a terribly well-managed company.’ So you’re a little less
willing to pay more for their earnings. The great secret about financial
markets is that, in some sense they [create] a self-fulfilling prophesy. If we all, as
investors, think that companies that are environmentally well-managed are going to perform better, we’ll pay more for them
and they will trade at a premium. They will be worth more
because of their environmental management. It’ll take a while. But giving people this information,
giving them another way to distinguish well-managed companies from the hoi
polloi is going to lead to that outcome.
Mary: So it could
unleash a cascade of sustainability.
Julie: Yes.
Mary: Kristen, when it comes to the SEC ruling and then, longer term, from
climate change itself, some businesses are going to be winners and some are
going to be losers, right? The impact, of course, will vary based on the
type and the size of the business in question. But given that, can you predict who the winners and losers will be, both short- and
long-term?
Kristen: There are two kinds of climate-related risks
that this SEC ruling is basically taking into account. On the one hand there’s
the risks that stem from the physical impacts of climate change. And on the
other hand, there are the risks that are embodied in the impacts of regulating
carbon and how that [regulation] is going to affect a firm’s operating costs and its
competitiveness.
The industries that are most vulnerable to the
physical impacts of climate change, we’ve talked about some of them already, include industries like agriculture, forestry and paper products, tourism,
real state, offshore energy development, and, of course, insurance. But
companies that use fossil fuels intensely in their production, like the
electric utilities that invest in high-emission power plants, or companies that
produce carbon-intensive products, like car companies that continue to produce
gas-guzzling SUVs rather than more efficient hybrids or diesel engines
are also examples of companies that are going to find themselves at a competitive
disadvantage in the future because of regulations on carbon and the resulting
decrease in demand for carbon-intensive technologies and products.
At
the same time, companies that demonstrate that they can meet this new demand
for low-emissions technology are gong to be at a competitive advantage.
And these are the companies I think we’ll see emerge as winners in the new green
economy. One of the
most beneficial things that might come out of this ruling is that it’s going to
help people begin to envision exactly which companies will or will not succeed
in a carbon-constrained world over the next 25-to-50 years. We talk
to people about how business-as-usual has to change, about how the economic
system has to be transformed in order to really meet the climate challenge. You
run up against the limits of people’s imaginations and their ability to think long-term about what that would look like? ‘What
kind of car am I going to be driving?’ ‘Where am I going to live?’ ‘What kind of
industries are my kids going to be working in?’ This is the first step in
systematically beginning to identify that these are the industries that are
poised to advance and these are the industries that are going to struggle in a
carbon-constrained world.
Mary: Sara, let
me loop you into the conversation here. We’ve been talking, thus far, about
the impact of this one, specific SEC decision’s effects on corporations and
investors and the economy in general.
But as a futurist, what is it going to mean to the rest of us? For the regular people, like the college student who’s pulling
coffee at Starbucks, or the single mom who’s stocking shelves at Wal-Mart, or the unemployed auto worker, public school teacher—you name
it. Is my life, or my habits, or my community going to change at all in the
next year, or 10 years, or 20 years? Can you look into the crystal
ball and tell us how?
Sara: This [ruling] is part of a very important inflection point. After 20 years of talking and educating each other about
climate change, we’re finally reaching the point where the doing is happening. Julie talked about turning supertankers. Changing our minds,
changing our attitudes, our beliefs about things is comparatively low-cost
compared to changing the entire financial and physical infrastructure of our
society, which is really what this is about. And so we’re at that point. When
the SEC makes guidances like this, it helps change the entire way money flows.
And that in turn will change the structures we live by. So, yes, within five
years I think investments will be flowing differently. Governments and
businesses will be making big decisions, high-stakes decisions that they
haven’t been willing to make on this kind of scale until this point. This does open the door. Changes will begin to happen more quickly because these [corporate] institutions
are big; they control a lot of our resources. Individuals residences are only about 15% of the carbon problem; business is 85%. When
business begins to change, that’s when the problem begins to get solved. I’m
very excited about the prospects here.
Mary: Kristen,
you pointed at one point, earlier in the conversation, that an accounting for environmental risks has been largely absent from long-term corporate planning. But isn’t long-term planning central to corporate
success? Does corporate America just not take climate change seriously? Have
the captains of industries just been sticking their heads in the sand on this
one? Or is corporate culture just not really designed at the moment to think
more than two or three quarters out?
Kristen: Long-term environmental risks have largely been absent from the forefront of
business priorities and decision-making, and they’ve been absent, largely, from
economics that then models those business decisions. In part, it’s
because all of us have had this default assumption,
whether we made it explicit or not, that we didn’t have to worry about
long-term environmental problems because between technological change and
economic growth would be able to negate
most, if not all, negative environmental feedbacks. And here we are talking
about an environmental crisis where the impacts are largely irreversible, at
least within a human time frame. It forces us to realize that we can’t wait for
technology to save us; we can’t just assume that being richer in the future
will insulate us from these feedbacks. We need to take proactive actions in the
present.
We could, of course, also point to all sorts of other things that
encourage institutional short-term decision-making. The current system of pay and rewards for corporate leaders, for example.
When a CEO’s pay depends largely upon stock options and dividends, it’s no
surprise that she’s going to make decisions based on short-term profitability
rather than long-term considerations. The SEC ruling really won’t change that, but at
least it’s going to give investors the information they need to determine which
firms are going to remain profitable over the long-term.
Mary: Julie, what’s
your view on that? On that kind of short-term thinking that has come to
dominate Wall Street, and American businesses, and certain investors, probably,
for at least the last couple of decades? Why do you think it’s become so
entrenched?
Julie: It’s really embedded in our society. We have
fast food, continuous polling in Congress. It’s all stuff
that tends to focus you on the right here, right now. What I call the wolf at
the door problem. If the most important thing in your life right now is that you
don’t have a job, you’re not going to be very worried about climate change. Climate
tends to be more of the termite in the basement problem. Termites will eat your house just as surely as the wolf will blow it down. But
you can’t wait until the termites have eaten the parlor floor until you act,
because by then it’s too late. We have greenhouse gases that persist in
the atmosphere for up to a century in many cases. It’s
something we have to start on now and get the payoff later. That is not
terribly in step with our current society.
Mary: Sara, let
me get back to you. When I think about our ability to think long-term as a
species, the Mayans built these huge temples, the Egyptians built pyramids, the
Europeans built cathedrals. All projects that took generations to
complete. The person who launched these projects—the pharoah, the archbishop—had to know that they certainly wouldn’t be alive to see their completion, nor
would their grandchildren, or their great-grandchildren. So
humans obviously possess the capacity for very long-term thinking. Are
there more contemporary examples of long-term planning that you could provide that would give us some hope in that regard? Or has that ability to plan for the long term somehow atrophied? If it has atrophied, why did it happen and how can we get it back?
Sara: First of
all, Americans are world-class planners; we are in league with those [temple, pyramid, cathedral] people. We
tend to do it on a very fast basis. We’re acute responders. We do it in the
E.R. What we don’t do in the long-range, we can do a lot, and very quickly, in the
short-range. We know how to organize and prioritize in a way that nobody in the
world has been able to do. We proved this in World War II: we were arming the
world and fighting a two-front war and we had these logistical tools. We had
this magical ability to plan that on a scale that nobody else really
could. It’s a gift that we have and we
take it very much for granted.
I think it’s going to come back to the fore. In
terms of longer-term thinking, the societies that you described were all monarchies
of one kind of another and in a democracy it’s harder to hold a vision for the
longer term. You need to assign the role of vision holding to the institutions
of your societies rather than to an individual like a king or a series of
kings. The way you do that is you embed it in your educational system and in
your religion. There are institutions that are foundational, that carry forward
our values and priorities from generation to generation. And as long as these institutions keep teaching
new generations you can hold the vision. Our education system, our
media, and to a very large extent our religious institutions, have a big role
to play here in holding that vision for as long as it’s going to take, which is
the rest of this century.
Mary: Let me
stick with this topic for a second. On the question of how does broad cultural
change usually happen, Sara, who and what are the reliable agents for this kind
of change? You mentioned religious and educational institutions. Is it ever business? In this SEC instance, could the corporate
community actually be a leader in this cultural shift toward a more strategic
long-term approach?
Sara: They’re not
a leader, but they’re an important follower. Change usually happens on a lot of
levels at once, but it always starts with a fundamental shift in our assumptions
and our visions about how the world should work. So the first thing, you have
to change the world, change the story. Most of us are aware that our
foundational assumptions about economics don’t work anymore, and
we’re actively looking for new paradigms. So, for the last 20 years, our documented
storytellers in religion, media and education, have been telling us that we
need to change our views around this, meaning our priorities around climate
change. And this is why 70% of us now get it; most of us are on board. But
that’s the talking stage; doing is harder, and doing only really happens when
you get business and government involved in actively taking these new values
and basing their decisionmaking process on them. I think that’s what we’re
seeing now. It’is that inflection point where business and government begin to get
on the side of change and that’s when we really start to see those changes
taking place on the ground.
Mary: Kristen,
let’s say that in the wake of this SEC ruling, American corporations stand up
and embrace climate-change related planning in a big way. What can we expect
the U.S. to look like in say, 30 or 50 years? What businesses will
dominate? Which will decline or disappear? Can you read the tea leaves a little
on that?
Kristen: Well,
it’s hard to say for sure. One of the challenges all along in thinking about
the post-fossil fuel economy is that fossil fuels provided such a quick and
easy and cheap energy source and there’s likely not going to be a single silver
bullet that comes along and replaces that. So we’re going to have an energy
system based on massive advances in energy-efficiency, as well as
different renewables—geothermal, solar, wind, etc. So
we’re likely to see a mixed of different energy sources and we may see a more
decentralized, more community-based energy production.
When you think about what’s actually going to have to happen in the U.S.
economy, say by the year 2050, to really get us on track for making a dent in
the climate problem, for doing what the scientists say we have to do to
minimize the worst risks from climate change, we’re looking at some pretty
significant transformations. By 2050, we need a minimum of 80% reduction in our
greenhouse gasses, and to achieve that we’re either going to have to convert
most of our energy system over to a mix of different renewables, or make some
really quick advances in carbon capture and storage by the midpoint of the next
century. We’re going to be investing in reforestation and prevention of deforestation.
Our companies are going to have to take a leadership role in both developing
the new technologies, but then also exporting and sharing the technologies for
renewable energy production with the developing world. These are huge changes
that have to take place in a relatively short period of time. But the good news
on the climate front is that it’s economically and technically
possible. What we really need is the political will and the public will to do
it at this point.
Sara: And if I
could add something here, one of the great things here about this ruling is
that it should, in the long-run, make our businesses stronger and more
innovative. Whenever we step outside of our usual assumptions to look for new
risks and threats, we also very often notice the new opportunities that we
would have never seen if we hadn’t been pushed out there. So by forcing
businesses to get real about their risk exposure, we’re also pushing them to where they’ll be able to see and position themselves for new opportunities
as well. So this is a competitiveness issue and investors hopefully reward
that.
Mary: Sara, when
you talked before about how we’ve done this before when America geared up for World
War II, for instance, with phenomenal results. Did that experience in World War II translate into
a planning culture, post-World War II? And again, how did we lose that ability?
Sara: We’d always been good at planning, but
World War II forced us to get good, fast. And what you found was, throughout
the military, from the highest general down to the supply clerk, everybody had
to learn to think strategically, three-steps ahead. ‘What am I gong to need
down the road?’ All of America went through this process, and when the boys
came home, these same skills got applied into creating post-war America. You
saw this in the way wives ran their households, and in the way bureaucrats ran city
governments. Suddenly, you had these planning departments, at the county
level mostly, that were planning out 10, 20 years. What schools are we
going to need? Where are we going to get our water? What kind of roads are we
going to need? People were thinking ahead.
The G.I. generation was amazing at
that. It’s what enabled them to put a man on the moon. Just sticking it out there, as
JFK did in 1960, and saying ‘we’re going to do this in ten years,’ with
technologies that didn’t even exist at the time. He said, ‘we’re going to put a marker out
and in 10 years we’re going to do this.’ And there was a tremendous confidence
in their own ability to hit that mark.
That was our parents and grandparents. It’s still in us. It’s still there in our culture. We’ve gotten away from it because we’ve been living
off the fat of the prosperity that all that planning created. So we’ve had a wide
margin for error. If we get something wrong, it’s not that big a deal; the
consequences aren’t that severe.
Buit we’re at a point now where Gallup is
telling us the number one concern of American families is paying off debt and
saving for the future. Families are starting to hunker down and come back
together and get serious because we don’t have that margin for error anymore.
The consequences for failure are high and getting higher. We have proven in
the past that we can focus wonderfully well under those circumstances, and I
have faith that we can do it again.
Mary: We only
have a few minutes left, so I’d quickly like to hear from all of you on this
last question. When
historians look back, in, let’s say, 50 years on how significant this January
SEC ruling is in terms of addressing climate change and sustainability, are
they going to say it was “no big deal” or that as Sarah pointed out,
it was “an inflection point?” Kristen?
Kristen: History books will look at this period of time
in our history as one of momentous social change. And with most social change,
when you’re in the middle of it, it’s sometimes hard to see how much of it is
actually going on around you. But I think when we look back 50 years from now
we’ll see this as the period of time when we finally
righted the ship.
Mary: Julie?
Julie: Fifty years from now, we’re either going to have 600 parts per million
carbon in the atmosphere or we’re going to have 300 ppm or so. If we’re in the
latter condition, that is, if we do manage to curtail our emissions and curb this
problem, then yes, I do think we’ll look back on [the SEC ruling] as one of the things that
caused the inflection point. This was the decade during which investors,
governments, citizens really started getting it, and really started
changing their behavior as a result. If [that doesn;t occur], then we’re going to look back
on this period of time and say “oh shit”—or add the epithet of your choice—we should have
seen it coming, we should have done something, this wasn’t enough.”
Mary: Sarah, as the futurist I’ll give you the last word. The SEC’s ruling in January: big deal or tiny blip on the radar screen?
Sarah: The SEC ruling is one piece of a larger shift that’s happening. As I said, it’s an inflection
point where we’re moving from talking to doing, and the doing is starting to
happen very quickly. I think over the next 10-20 years, as the money flow
shifts, and the way we think about it really begins to shift in terms of policy
and the larger decisions we make as a culture, we’re going to be
surprised at how much progress finally gets made. It seems so slow until now. But we’re really hitting that point. It’s really going to move.
And Julie is absolutely right. Looking back 50 years there are really only
two scenarios: one is that we responded correctly and got it right. The other is that we didn’t
and the results will be really quite awful.
Mary: And we’ll have to leave it
at that. Thank you to our panelists: Julie Gorte, Kristen Sheeran, and Sara
Robinson. Thanks also to our listeners for tuning in. This program was produced in conjunction with The Climate Desk, a journalistic collaboration dedicated to exploring the impact of a changing climate.
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