Why aren’t we attacking climate change like it’s WWIII?

“Why aren’t we attacking climate change like it’s WWIII?”

That was the question posed by former Secretary of State John Kerry in his lecture today at Northwestern University. It came after a summary of the global climate problem and some examples of how it will affect everyone on our planet.

His point was that when he was a child growing up in post-war Germany, he witness first hand not only the destruction of WWII, but also the cooperative rebuilding that took place afterwards. American and global investment into those destroyed places allowed us to enter the following era of relative peace and prosperity.

Now we face an enemy, a problem bigger than any faced by our society before, but we are hesitating to make the necessary investments to solve it.

My key takeaway was this: everyone has a role in fighting climate change.

As the first United States special presidential envoy for climate, it was Kerry’s job to navigate American and global politics and fight for investment into solving the climate problem through policies.

Scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs have the important job of creating scalable and affordable solutions.

Leaders of industry need to embrace change, take risks, and implement these new solutions as quickly and broadly as they can.

Other people are called to raise awareness and bring attention to the issue.

Obviously most people don’t think of their job as directly related to the climate. But I would argue that if you live in this world and work in our economy that you inherently DO.

As you go through the rest of your week, I would urge you to think about what your role can be.

Now to answer the former Secretary’s question, I have my own hypothesis.

There’s a trust problem going on. No one wants to slow down their economy to hit their emissions goals just for someone else to ignore climate change and out compete. These politicians are scared that their country will be left high and dry, erasing the progress they’ve made to compete on the global economic playing field.

How do we solve this problem? Someone has to take a leap of faith. And it has to be one of the big players that has both a large economy and a large share of global emissions. That pretty much boils it down to China and the United States, which emit about 31% and 14% of CO2 and make up 16% and 24% of global GDP respectively.

Despite leading renewable electricity installation by a large margin, China is not on pace to hit 2030 or 2050 goals that are in line with the Paris agreement.

In the U.S. we’ve passed the IRA, which was a great first step, but by no means has done enough yet. Our policies and actions are still insufficient to reach the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees C.

The world looks up the U.S. as a beacon for where our whole society is going. As U.S. citizens, we can’t directly control what China and others do, but we can influence our home country, and thereby influence the rest of the world.

I would argue that unless the U.S. steps up further to confidently lead the world to an energy revolution, we won’t hit our 2030 or 2050 goals. We might not even come close. And it’s on all of us in politics, business, and education to set an example for the rest of the world to follow.