The world has to rethink clean energy development

The 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report made it clear that by 2030, one of two things will have happened: either we will have reduced emissions by 45% (and continued to lower emissions to 0% by 2050), or we will have burned through the remaining carbon budget and be on track to hitting temperature increases above 1.5°C.

For businesses, the future is binary and will require some sacrifice either way. Within the next decade, we will blow through the 1.5°C ceiling and have absolutely no license to operate any kind of energy-intensive business (which would exponentially exacerbate the climate problem). Or, we will find ourselves in a world where we avoided climate catastrophe and the world operates within a standard deviation of the status quo (undoubtedly with some environmental regulations).

To accomplish the latter, the world needs to increase investments into clean energy tenfold from $280B to $2.4T every year (note: the IPCC report specifically uses the word “investments,” not “donations”).

There is no clear idea where this remaining $2.1T will come from. While historically global energy investments have been government-driven, it’s increasingly clear that government leadership is insufficient, especially within our required timeline. Carbon taxes would be helpful to raise money but would…