KIMBERLEY — The key to changing people’s thinking about climate change action is to create stories of clean abundance, according to the man who gave the plenary keynote speech on climate change at the Columbia Basin Trust’s symposium over the weekend.
Tom Rand is a green entrepreneur, investor, advisor, public speaker, author and a managing partner of ArcTern Venture, a clean-tech capital venture firm. Delivering his keynote at Shift! Thriving in Change, Rand proposed that the best way to get people excited to take on climate change is to start from the solution, rather than the problem.
“If we work backwards from what the world looks like having solved this problem. If we walk about a world of energy abundance underwritten by high tech, clean-engine technology built out by engineers or tradespeople in a world of abundance, that future is — first of all, we like the sound of it, so we are pre-disposed to believe it,” he said.
“It speaks to our ingenuity, it speaks to the world in progress, the future being better than the past, is an economically uplifting story — because you can’t rebuild our energy systems without involving every trade, every engineer — pretty much every profession that we have is part of this economic stimulus — and of course we detach ourselves from burning a finite resource.… That story happens to be true.”
Rand began his presentation with a look at the Paris climate pledges and acknowledged that even if each country keeps its pledge it will still only reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to hold global warming to 3.5 degrees C, not two degrees as hoped.
Rand also explained that it’s really the social impacts of climate change that should concern people.
“It is the threats that emerge from our responses to stresses on our system,” he said, citing a sticker-shock in the price of bread due to droughts in the U.S. as a hypothetical example. “Imagine the kind of social pressures we would see south of the border.”
But in keeping with his own advice, Rand looked to the positive side, suggesting that the Basin might be able to leverage its abundance of hydroelectric power to affect change in other regions.
“Leverage that resource so it becomes the fast following back up regionally, especially down south and to your east, so that your hydro resources essentially unlock the capacity for other regions, other jurisdictions to have a fairly open-ended amount of wind and solar, for example,” he said.
