IPCC Report: Let’s get on with it!
We need to stop talking about what we can’t do, and start talking about what we can
The IPCC has updated its review of the Physical Science Basis for Climate Change for the first time since 2013. Too long to wait as far as many are concerned, the publication of the latest report yesterday has coincided with disastrous wildfires in Greece, Turkey and California. In the starkest terms yet seen, the IPCC is warning the world that climate change can no longer be ignored. Climate change will affect everyone, causing dramatic changes in the circumstances of our lives.
But there is a depressing emphasis on an argument that has long dogged the subject. The report goes to some trouble to re-state the case that the problems seen in global warming and the resulting changes to the climate are man-made. Is this really necessary?
Green Angel Syndicate CEO, Nick Lyth, asks the world’s leaders gathering later in the year to move on:
“Surely it’s time to stop talking about who is to blame. We have to get on with doing what we all agree has to be done to arrest the warming and put the changes to our climate into reverse.”
Green Angel Syndicate, one of the largest angel syndicates in the UK, and the only one specialising in the fight against Climate Change, believes that the battle against climate change will not be won by debating what we cannot do, it will be won by talking about what we can do, and doing it.
“We invest in climate tech innovations that help to reduce and reverse carbon emissions, transforming the industrial and engineering systems on which we depend,” Lyth continued. “If we can get this right, we stand a chance of meeting the challenges the IPCC report describes.”
The IPCC report has served one useful purpose, however, which is to move the headlines away from the pandemic and onto the climate crisis. The terms of the report are too shocking to be ignored. They have been widely reported by the media, sparing nothing in the description of real and existential dangers coming to threaten us all.
Boris Johnson has called the IPCC Report “sobering reading” and a “wake-up call”. COP26 President Alok Sharma says the report “shows all too clearly… the deficiency of our response [to the climate crisis] to date”.
In an open letter to industry this month, the Government challenged institutional investors to create ‘an investment big bang’ for a green recovery. This is laudable, but the public sector must also play its part. Here at Green Angel Syndicate we urge the UK Government to lead the way and act now. Here are 3 steps that we believe would be most effective for delivering the ‘deep emissions cuts’ the IPCC report calls for:
- Invest in climate tech as seriously as if it were a vaccine for Covid-19 and increase funding for entrepreneurs exponentially.
- Support independent, early stage entrepreneurs in finding solutions to the climate crisis. It is these nimble startups, rather than large multinationals, that are most able to identify what we need and (if they have the right support and funding) innovate to provide it.
- Use Government subsidies to incentivise multinationals to adopt these entrepreneurial inventions.
