Page 64 - Supplemento 2-2016 (ENG)

dr. Jamie shea

There is a positive agenda to this, for heaven’s sake. For example, the
World Bank estimates that we need to invest about $90 trillion over the next 30
years to improve our global infrastructure, in many parts of Europe and also
on US highways, which are collapsing fast. But, if we do that in an environmen-
tally sustainable way, the additional cost is only about 5% on top of those $90
trillion. President Obama tried to make a good case in the United States that
investing in green technologies, renewables and sustainability is not just good
for the environment but it is good innovation (Obama set up an innovation
project with China and India) and it can be a potential job creator.

Going green does not necessarily mean being poor, even though I agree
that the poor are among the ones most affected by that at the moment. The
narrative on this is totally wrong and in politics if you don’t have a good nar-
rative you may as well give up. For instance, if you go to the Republicans in the
United States Senate and try to talk about climate change, you don’t get much
of a hearing frankly; there are still a lot of denials around it. But if you start
talking to them about super storm Sandy, or about hurricane Katrina and you
talk about the 5-feet of sea level rise in Miami, which would flood metropolitan
downtown Miami, you do get the attention. Hence, we clearly need to develop
a narrative which balances alarmism with the sense that it’s doable, that we have
the green energy technologies if we just invest in them, which can effectively
not only convert us to a lower carbon economy in the next 70 years but also to
a non-carbon economy in the next 70 years.

The next part of our narrative is that we have to balance between what
we have to do within our own society, this reflects that we have everywhere
now to defend our own village or our own country, by disconnecting from the
rest of the world (the UK’s current Brexit debate reflects that) and what we
have to do in terms of our global citizens responsibility to help others; because
if we don’t help them, they will send us their people.

So, first we need a climate change forum; secondly, we need a narrative
which is going to mobilise public opinion, beyond the Hollywood disaster
movie type of narrative; thirdly, we need to get our forecasting right: it is beco-
ming increasingly sophisticated.

For example, the World Resources Institute in Washington has a fantastic

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