Taking Action Against Climate Change: Panel Discussion Recap

In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report that shook people across the globe to their cores. The report outlined the catastrophic  consequences of global warming of 1.5 ºC, from droughts and floods to extreme heat and poverty for millions of people. However, the report also offered hope: if we take decisive action over the 10 years following the report, we can mitigate global warming and greatly reduce its potential impacts.

This report hit our panelists hard, and it played a significant role for two of them in bringing them to where they are today. “I kind of joke that I’ve always been that Prius and Tesla driving guy, doing my fair share (which is not enough),” Kevin says. “[When the report came out] my youngest daughter was turning 6, and I thought about the discussion in 10 years’ time when she was turning 16 and she said, ‘What did you do about this?’, and I didn’t have a good answer.”

Kevin decided to use his expertise to make an impact. “I was managing a venture fund at the time, and I thought that was the best use of my time. I quickly recut a plan for a new fund around the climate.” The result was Climate Innovation Capital, a fund focusing on catalyzing the scaling and adoption of solutions that decarbonize the economy. “I’m incredibly optimistic, and prior to that I was somewhat pessimistic,” Kevin says. “It’s an amazing time for change right now.”

For Isabel, the IPCC report reoriented her focus from political economy to the climate. She had long been interested in trade and investment policy-- particularly trade agreements -- in shaping interactions between government and the private sector. At the time the report came out, she was working at a reproductive health NGO. “I decided I really needed to shift my career to focus more directly on [climate],” she says. 

Isabel’s role at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy dovetails perfectly with her interests and motivations. “I managed to find a role that sits really nicely at the nexus of trade and climate policy. It’s a very exciting time to be working on this…The UK actually has some very world-leading emissions reduction targets. Our 2030 target is 78% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels, compared to 40-45% below 2005 levels for Canada. It feels like the right place to be at the right time.”

Audrey grew up in a very environmentally conscious household, and she has carried that into all of her interactions. “I’ve always been that person who will harp on my friends for things like not using plastic water bottles,” she says. “Greenwood has been a huge part in my journey of learning how to communicate my expertise. I was the Executive of the Environmental Committee, so I learned how to impact people in a way that was manageable for them.” 

In one of her introductory courses at McGill this year, Audrey learned about mental distancing - the idea that we can detach from what we are experiencing, especially if we don’t deal with the consequences. “Living in the Global North as we do, all of our garbage is out of sight, out of mind,” Audrey says. “I learned this year that all of our garbage and its fallout are dealt with by people in the Global South, and that really hit me. It motivates me to want other people to not have to deal with my stuff.”

The scale of the climate crisis can feel very overwhelming for many of us. The panel discussed how they stay motivated given the enormity of the challenge. “First of all, I think that to feel really frightened, overwhelmed and angry about the climate crisis is not an irrational reaction,” Isabel says. “For a long time, I felt actually quite depressed about the disconnect between reality as I knew it and how I was expected to live as if that reality wasn’t before us.” Isabel found the lack of action by political leaders to be particularly upsetting. 

Engaging with the facts directly and honestly and finding communities of like-minded people have allowed Isabel to stay motivated and positive. “I don’t think you can overcome that feeling of upset until you yourself are taking action in your own life,” she says. For Isabel, smaller consumer changes were not enough - she feels real change will happen at the level of businesses and governments, and she wants to help push for that change. 

Many people think that protecting the planet will come at the expense of the economy. Kevin doesn’t agree, but it took him some time to come to that realization. “I think you can draw a straight line to capitalism as being one of the major culprits [of climate change], if not the biggest one, and I didn’t understand that you can turn that off,” he says. Kevin was pessimistic for a long time, but in 2018-2019, it hit him that capitalism can actually solve the problem. In a capitalist society, people want to make money, and it’s possible to do that by investing in renewable solutions. “You can see every day that money is flowing into renewable energies and the industries created around that, and that’s incredibly powerful.”

Kevin has been active with his fund for close to 20 months, and the fund is currently looking at close to 500 companies, all around decarbonization of the economy. “All the innovation is incredibly uplifting,” Kevin says. He also stresses that his fund is not a social impact fund. “You don’t have to take a discount for putting money into this fund. I’ve joked a few times saying that you could be a climate denier and still want to come into the fund, because we’re going to return the same profitability picture as a regular fund.”

While change is needed at the government and industry levels, we can also make an impact with our individual choices. “A lot of it has to do with your mindset,” Audrey says. Greta Thunberg’s alarmist mindset, while important, can be very overwhelming; we also need to have some hope, which is what will motivate many people to make small changes. “It doesn’t have to be perfect - you don’t have to be fully vegan or never drive a car,” she says. She also emphasizes that a multidisciplinary approach is important, bringing creatives together with engineers to find solutions to environmental issues.

Thank you to Kevin, Isabel and Audrey for sharing their expertise and thoughts on this critical issue with us, and all the members of the Greenwood community who joined us in person or online. We hope you found motivation to make changes in your own life that can add to the growing movement to take action against climate change.