Last week, I delivered a part 1 review and comment on my experience at the excellent MHI Annual Conference in Tucson, AZ (see Trip Report: MHI Annual Conference), with a promise for part 2 this week.
Alas, I only made it about halfway through my copious notes on the many sessions I attended, so that part 2 will have to wait.
So what’s a poor supply chain columnist to do?
Gilmore Says.... |
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| “We should prepare for extreme heat, floods and vector-borne disease in places where they haven’t yet occurred. We also need to consider changing where and how we grow crops, and where people can safely live,” they add. |
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To my good fortune, this week in the Wall Street Journal came a very interesting and controversial guest column on what if anything to do about climate change, from two authors who normally are on different sides of this debate.
Those authors would be Alex Flint, executive director of the Alliance for Market Solutions and a former Republican staff director of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, and Kalee Kreider, a consultant and a former climate adviser to Al Gore.
The title says is all: “We Can’t Stop Climate Change, So We Need to Prepare for It.’
Typically on opposed on the issues, now the authors say “we now share an uncomfortable conclusion: Despite decades of dire projections about the climate, humanity has shown that it’s unwilling to impose the limits on economic activity that would be necessary to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, or even below 2 degrees.”
They add that “As global energy demand continues to grow, fossil-fuel use remains dominant, and political commitments fall short of the necessary transformation. It isn’t that society can’t change but that it won’t. Around the world, people are giving priority to higher living standards, economic security and access to affordable energy above a stable climate.”
That is no question where climate matters have been heading, but I’ve not seen anyone say it so starkly.
That doesn’t mean, they say, that the climate movement’s work has been in vain. Because of advocacy, technology development and policy innovation, an energy transition is under way. The US and many other nations have built cleaner energy sources and found more efficient ways of producing electricity, avoiding greenhouse-gas emissions that once seemed inevitable. Globally, emissions per unit of economic activity have fallen consistently for over 50 years.
But that improvement has been more than offset by surging energy demand, driven by population and economic growth.
“The net result is that emissions are likely to increase for another decade before stabilizing, which means atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will climb through the end of the century,” he authors say.
Mitigation - efforts to reduce or prevent climate change - won’t keep global warming within safe limits, they add. The best scientific models suggest that the planet is on track to warm roughly 3 to 3.5 degrees Celsius by 2100 and then to warm more in the next century.
 “If that’s the future we’re headed toward, then our response must change,” the authors conclude.
They don’t advocate giving up on mitigation entirely, saying that reducing emissions remains essential for limiting the scale of the problem.
They also both believe in the incredible ingenuity of people and markets.
“But we must now direct at least as much creativity, investment and political will toward adaptation. That means responding to climate effects as they happen while also anticipating and preparing for them,” Flint and Kreider argue in the piece.
“We should prepare for extreme heat, floods and vector-borne disease in places where they haven’t yet occurred. We also need to consider changing where and how we grow crops, and where people can safely live,” they add.
The authors note that the National Intelligence Council warned in 2021 that “climate change will increasingly exacerbate risks to US national security interests as the physical impacts increase and geopolitical tensions mount about how to respond.”
They add that climate change’s effects on national security could mean the need for new security agreements, positioning troops in different parts of the world, and preparing for the disruption that will occur from large-scale human migration and conflict over scarce resources.
Wrapping things up, Flint and Kreider put it this way: “For too long, the debate over climate change has been framed as a battle between denial and ambition, between doing nothing and doing everything. It’s time to embrace a third way: clear-eyed realism. We must acknowledge what humanity is and isn’t willing to sacrifice and plan accordingly.”
Last words: “We wish that mitigation alone could save us from a warming world. But wishful thinking won’t change human nature or the physics of our atmosphere. The climate is changing, and it’s up to us to be prepared.”
I may have drifted a bit outside the normal supply chain bounds of SCDigest here, but thought this was just such a different take, with climate issues still looming large is many companies, it was highlighting.
Would love your thoughts.
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