Yesterday marked the beginning of the annual Climate Week in New York City.  With 600 events planned over the week the event started with the launch of a Global-to-do list to get climate ‘back on track’.

The shopping list has quite a bit on it:

• Support workers to power down coal - pay a three year redundancy when the site closes early.
• Unleash renewables - government and regulation need to get out of their own way if we are to achieve the COP28 commitment to triple installed renewables by 2030.
• Ban relining of coal-based steel furnaces - it will perpetuate a further 15 years of coal usage and not encourage investment in electric furnaces.
• Get serious on methane - there needs to be a faster and sustained reduction in methane emissions (which accounts for approximately 16% of GHG emissions).
• Stop ignoring efficiency - when we talk transition we tend to focus on the supply side of the paradigm, but companies should be trying to achieve YoY reductions in consumption through investment in efficiency and address the demand side too.
• Buy clean - deploy the power of the spend of business and more importantly government, to insist on change - put your money where your mouth is.
• Tax oil and gas companies to finance the transition - an emitter pays type penalty.

The to-do-list could have been prefaced with ‘Dear Asia’; accounting for 46% of annual emissions, most of the issues within the to-do-list are easily recognisable in the region.  With major economies including China, India, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea, they all have challenges peculiar to themselves, but all need focus to address them and in so doing make a meaningful impact on emissions.

The recently published Mckinsey Global Energy Perspective 2024 contains the stark but not surprising statement that even if all countries deliver on their current transition commitments (which they won’t), emissions remain on a 1.5° pathway increase in 2050.

Replacing the existing fossil fuel based power capacity is a challenge of itself, but with a 25-30% project increase in demand expected over the next 25 years from newer industries such as data centres, AI, green steel / cement, EVs etc. the current pathway doesn't work.  It lacks scale, and it lacks pace.

IRENA's Renewable energy statistics 2024 note that year to date 350GW of new renewables have been installed globally.  The report doesn't distinguish between fossil fuels, but the installed capacity continues to grow YoY.  The United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI) recognises the importance of contextualised pathways to transition and this is something that the recently formed Singapore Sustainable Finance Association is hoping to contribute towards.  In Asia, gas will play a role so that coal can be retired sooner and that is an example of a specific, or contextualised pathway.  The Mckinsey report suggests a decade long plateau of fossil fuel emissions but it would be interesting to see how the forecast breaks down as between coal and alternative fuels.

Either way, the truth is, every week is Climate Week, and the sooner this is recognised, the sooner the barriers to scale and deployment can be addressed.  Capital isn't an issue in Asia, it is pipeline and debottlenecking process.