IPCC Report: Summary for Policymakers and Comments

Jay OwenSustainability News, Latest Headlines

“Ethical Markets has been following and reporting on all these crucial Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes reports, collating all the world’s key research assembled by thousands of volunteering top scientists in all these fields.

This herculean IPCC effort is finally being given the attention it has long deserved, after often being ignored over many earlier years by politicians in denial, media editors and pundits often influenced by their advertisers in what we call out as “commercial censorship“, as well as clouds of disinformation from incumbent polluting industries, particularly from the biggest CO2 -emitting fossil fuels energy companies and other fossilized industries and their public relations and intellectual mercenaries.

This newest warning to our human family, now beleaguered by the evidence of climate crises worldwide, must be heeded immediately, especially in the run-up to COP 26 to be held in November in Glasgow, Scotland. We simply must stop burning fossil fuels!

We at Ethical Markets have urged asset managers for over a decade to open up their obsolete algorithms and re-categorize their stranded fossil reserve assets from: “fuel“ to future potential “feedstocks” as an intellectual makeshift way of easing their transition to re-deploy their funds under management to all the thousands of new green technologies and companies we have research in our Green Transition Scoreboard® annual reports since 2009.

Financial markets and systems can no longer operate under the outdated, price-derived macroeconomic statistics, including GDP, which continue to deepen the market failures they create along with trillions of external costs, including the global climate catastrophe.

We have urged, for example in “Transitioning to Science-Based Investing“ (2020), that updated scientific metrics take over where more appropriate, based on tracking all the physical changes outlined again in this IPCC report. Through these more realistic lenses, beyond obsolete economics and its equilibrium models, we can see all the opportunities for transitioning toward what we call the “Solar Age“ (see my Mapping the Global Transition to the Solar Age: From Economism To Earth Systems Science“, Foreword by NASA Chief Scientist Bushnell, London (2014), (free download from www.ethicalmarkets.com)

Markets and money are wonderful tools used by humans for centuries, whether in the canoes trading between Pacific Islands using shells (Polanyi, 1957), or Native Americans trading across their continent using wampum. But unless used only in appropriate conditions, set for the Adam Smith (1776), they lead to market failures.

So, we also highly recommend that to pursue opportunities to bend ambient CO2 emissions within the 10-year timeframe the IPCC has outlined, we must use all the new technological tools and invest in the new companies of the cleaner, more inclusive, sustainable, knowledge-richer green sectors worldwide, as we have covered.

We also are happy to recommend similar studies and many asset managers with successful 21st century, fossil-free portfolios as outlined in the latest RethinkX group’s report “RETHINKING CLIMATE CHANGE: How Humanity Can Choose to Reduce Emissions 90% by 2035 through the Disruption of Energy, Transportation and Food with Existing Technologies“ (2021).

We agree with this report which conforms to our research, especially in the Food sector as the global shift to plant-based foods and beverages, along with cell-grown meats and fish, and fermentation of other nutritious proteins continues to grow double-digit rates. We also include expanding our Food system with halophyte plants (e.g., quinoa, amaranth, Salicornia, salt-tolerant rice) grown in 22 countries for centuries without pesticides, fertilizers, and whose long roots capture ambient CO2 more efficiently even than forests. This shift away from animal-based protein, together with adding halophytes to our diets, saves the planet’s 3% of freshwater and adds to the release of 2 thirds of the world agricultural land currently devoted to animal-raising and feeding, as wells as reducing 15% current GHG emissions, (see our TV show playing on our home page “Investing in Saltwater Agriculture“ with NASA Chief Scientist Bushnell).

Biologists and presumably all the IPCC scientists, know that evolution is never an equilibrium-based process and always happens in the jumps they refer to as “punctuated equilibrium”, which now must be taught to economists!

There is no time for cynicism or despair.  Our beloved children deserve our greatest efforts now to finally make this global shift to avert more climate disruption!

All comments are welcomed!

~Hazel Henderson, Editor (author of “The Politics of the Solar Age“ (1981, 1988, now in 800 libraries in over 20 languages)”.