Pinching Pennies for the Climate Transition

Hello and welcome to the Strawman. Like Google Maps, we’re your guide to the climate. Strap in, we’re going on a road trip (in an EV of course)!

Fighting climate change is an expensive business. Forget funding all of these new upstarts and their crazy ideas, most of the cost is just to scale the things we know work.

A McKinsey report found that in order to support our transition to Net Zero we are required to increase spending on low emission assets by $3.5 trillion every single year for the next decade. This might include new solar panels, wind farms, new batteries, and beyond. Alongside this, we’ll also need to reallocate $1 trillion from high-emission to low-emission assets. That’s asking a lot for something a quarter of elected in officials in congress deny is a real problem…

If we don’t make these changes, the results could be devastating and are likely to cost manifold more in the long term once factoring environmental damage. Before you know it, we might be using plastic straws as money!

Over the last year, we’ve seen pressure come in to companies from regulators, customers, employees and beyond to do their part.

So how are big companies helping fund the climate transition?

Yesterday, Apple announced the launch of a $200m Carbon Removal Fund in partnership with HSBC. They’ll be supporting carbon removal projects with the aim to remove 1 million metric tons of CO2 per year while also making a financial return for investors.

Critics argue that carbon offsets and removal funds, like the one announced by Apple, allow for big companies to pay away their responsibilities instead of taking more fundamental action.

Apple is actually pretty far ahead compared to other big tech players. They aim to hit carbon neutrality across all products by 2030. 75% of their plans to hit carbon neutrality come from redesigning products, processes, and supply chains. Only 25% of their plan is made up from carbon removal initiatives.

Other companies, on the other hand, see these carbon removal funds as an easy way to opt out of redesigning their business for greener times. As long as their margins allow, that is…

Until next time,

The Strawman