Reflexive Realism: Talking with Shell about Climate Change
(This post was originally published on the Perspectiva website on June 6, 2016)
I am bored by reading people who are allies, people of roughly the same views. What is interesting is to read the enemy; because the enemy penetrates the defences. — Isaiah Berlin
‘If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem’ is entirely misconceived. If you are not part of the problem, you cannot be part of the solution. — Bill Torbert
A few months ago I was asked to give a keynote presentation at an event organised by Shell, an organisation I had promised myself I wouldn’t work with. I finally attended the London chapter of Powering Progress Together on Thursday and learned a great deal. The chess grandmaster in me was deeply impressed by Shell’s willingness to ‘make their move’ and ‘seek falsification’ — two essential qualities of the strongest chess players. Weaker players tend to look for confirming evidence of their ideas, but that leads to groupthink and blind spots. The key to learning and growing in any endeavour is to robustly question your own plans and desires, which often means spending time with people with different worldviews.
From an anthropological perspective it was fascinating to ‘hang out’ with a wide range of Shell’s staff who clearly have diverging views on their company’s response to the climate question. The overall vibe was something like: ‘We get it, and we’re doing what we can, but there’s only so much we can do’. In a spirited reflection at the end of the day a fellow speaker summed up the situation as follows: “Shell are saying: ‘We’re the baddies, but we are good baddies, and you need us. In fact you’re baddies too. Let’s find a way to be goodies together.’”
I spoke directly with their CEO Ben Van Beurden and their Senior Vice President Jeremy Bentham; both seemed genial and eager to hear challenging views — with hindsight I think I needlessly pulled my punches. The other speakers were of a high calibre (Douglas Terrier of NASA and Jason Pontin of MIT were highlights) and it helped that BBC’s Economics Editor Kamal Ahmed chaired well, always respectful to his hosts but intelligently amplifying rather than suppressing critique.
I still believe the end of oil and gas hegemony has to be rapidly accelerated, but since the broad consensus on climate change is no longer about facts or even direction, but mostly about speed — and what follows from speed — it is much easier to disagree productively. I have written this post to encourage others working on climate mitigation to continue the conversation with companies like Shell, and to provide some ammunition for both sides of that conversation.
The unassailable logic and the unbelievable challenge:
Start by doing what’s necessary, then do what’s possible; suddenly you find you are doing the impossible. — St Francis of Assisi (c1215)
My reservations about attending were not based on any personal dislike for the company (I grew up in Aberdeen, then the oil capital of Europe, so feel some natural affinity). The idea of not engaging stemmed from a relatively straightforward reading of what it might take to retain the quality and viability of our only human habitat:
1. What matters scientifically are total and cumulative emissions in the atmosphere.
2. We have to stay within an exacting carbon budget to have a chance of a healthy planet.
3. The continuing burning of fossil fuels is the main barrier to decarbonisation.
4. We need to do everything we can to accelerate the energy transition.
5. Fossil fuel companies are constrained by a commercial interest in slowing down this process.
6. The best way to speed up is to remove their social licence to operate through stigmatisation.
7. We should resist attempts to normalise their business models through cultural engagement.
(For a fuller expression of this case, see ‘The Unassailable Logic’ on pages 28–31 of Money Talks)
The problem with this logic is that while climate change is perhaps our preeminent challenge, there are other things going on the world, most of which require energy. Compare the following line of reasoning:
1. What matters socially and politically is reducing energy poverty and meeting energy need in an advanced and developing technological civilisation.
2. It is an ethical imperative to find a way to meet the legitimate material aspirations of the developing world, who want to live as we do in the developed world.
3. ‘Fossil fuels’ is an intellectually lazy expression. We need oil, not least for fuel, and in the short term we need to supplant coal with gas to give us enough time to develop renewable technology.
4. The necessary energy transition is underway, but ‘accelerate’ is too crude a goal. It’s not a linear race; it’s about meeting diverse needs with diverse resources in diverse places.
5. Oil and Gas Companies have legitimate commercial interests in a global economy, shaped entirely by universal human desire and prevailing policy constraints.
6. We should keep talking about realistic approaches to energy and climate change based on kilajoules per person, and our capacity to generate that sustainably.
7. Companies like Shell understand energy, and need to be part of the cultural conversation.
(A more detailed version of this kind of argument is unpacked in ‘The Unbelievable Challenge’ on pages 32–35 of Money Talks.)
This latter argument is my interpretation of the position outlined by Shell in their two most recent publications:
1. A Better Life in a Healthy Planet: Pathways to zero net emissions.
A scenario supplement describing the kinds of things that will have to happen to achieve the globally agreed target of keeping average mean surface temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius.
2. Shell Energy Transitions and Portfolio Resilience
A freely available company-focussed document, explaining why Shell believes oil and gas will be needed for the foreseeable future.
From these documents it is clear that Shell accepts the viability of a two degree constraint (although it remains clear to everybody — not just Shell — that it looks viable only on the basis on currently unproven technologies). However, it is equally clear that Shell is not currently aligning their business model with that objective.[i]
The first and most fundamental challenge to Shell is why they position themselves as an observer rather than participant with respect to the new political consensus on a two degree aspiration, for instance as outlined in the IEA’s 450 scenario.[ii] There appears to be a big mismatch between their vision and their strategy. That incongruity was the basis of my short speech, which went roughly as follows (for presentational purposes the speech was not read, and therefore came out very differently).
What if reality is a battle that has to be fought and won?
You and those who agree with you have a monopoly on realism and practicality. You are ‘balanced’ and ‘informed’. Your enemies are ‘naive’ and ‘short sighted’. And you accuse them of wanting ‘a sudden death of fossil fuels’. No phrase in your speech is more revealing. Nobody is asking for this and if they were they would be wasting their time. But the Freudian intensity of your complaint flashes from the text like a bolt of lightning. — John Ashton to Shell CEO, Ben Van Beurden[iii]
I am a climate civilian. Until about five years ago I had given climate change little more thought than your average educated, socially engaged person. I was working on behaviour change at the Royal Society of Arts, and we were approached by a campaign company to explore how to apply behavioural insight to fuel efficient driving, supported by Shell.[iv] I am grateful to Shell for that experience, because it really woke me up, giving me the first glimpse into some of the limitations of behaviour change and the false consciousness that pervades the climate change debate. In the ensuing years I wrote A New Agenda on Climate Change: Facing up to stealth denial and winding down on fossil fuels(2013) and ran The Seven Dimensions of Climate Change(2015) project at the RSA. I am currently writing a book for Palgrave Macmillan (published in 2017) that will distil what I learnt from these research and public engagement projects, and I recently became a Trustee at Climate Outreach, which has helped deepen my understanding of climate communication.
As a climate civilian who is not inclined to take up arms, I can see that you are just as human as me, and it makes no sense to avoid you. Those who care about climate change need to work more often and more directly with those who have the greatest ability to deal with it, including many assembled in this room. How can I put this? You are a major part of the problem, but that means that one way or the other you’ll have to be a major part of the solution.
I come to climate change then, not so much through a moral lens of good and bad, or a commercial lens of profit and loss, but through a psychological lens of sanity and insanity; more precisely, of wisdom and delusion. For me the climate challenge requires unprecedented technological innovation, yes, but we also need unprecedented levels of intellectual, emotional and political perspicacity.
In Buddhism, there is an eightfold path of living well that begins with ‘right view’ — by which is meant seeing clearly, without distortion, and taking responsibility for that as a lifelong practice. If we want to ‘get real’ on climate change, we need ‘right view’ — we need as far as possible to see things as they are, rather than as we might wish them to be. My seven dimensions framework — science, technology, law, economy, democracy, culture, and behaviour — is in this space; an attempt to help people think more fully and systemically.
From hearing you speak today and reading your recent external relations work, including your scenarios publications, are clearly in the reality-construction business. I don’t mean you are trying to manipulate people; it’s more like you are trying, against the odds, to persuade yourself of your continued relevance and value — a very human trait. You wield abundant data to pro-actively resist the idea that we can somehow transform the entire energy system from predominantly fossil fuel based, to predominantly — if not entirely- renewables based within a few decades. You might be right. I am not alone in hoping you are wrong.
Clearly it is very important to you that it is Shell’s version of reality that is viewed as the most realistic (in his opening remarks we noticed Ben Van Beurden invoked ‘reality’ and ‘realism’ and being ‘realistic’ several times). In this respect you are invested in the idea that the new frontline on climate change, the developing world, is a new market of galloping energy need and demand, where your products are needed for people to reach living standards like our own. You recognise the nature of this reality would change if we had a serious and ideally global price on carbon, but we’re not there yet.
I have mixed feelings about this position. On the one hand it feels reasonable to describe growing energy demand as ‘inexorable’ and it is right to clarify, as you do, that this doesn’t mean a demand for multiple cars and TVs, but merely features of a better life that we can’t argue with, like housing, sanitation and effective transport. I can also see why, as a large commercial entity in a global market for energy, you just have to play by the existing rules, and need — perhaps sometimes even want- governments to force your hand.
On the other hand this position sounds like a mixture of learnt helplessness and motivated reasoning. The idea that we can’t do anything without a proper carbon price is a form of displacement — of saying you can’t help it, and that it is somebody else’s job to curb your enthusiasm. You must be aware of just how difficult it is to achieve such a policy outcome, so asking for it without pro-actively doing more to bring it about risks looking like stalling.
Or to put it another way, what can Shell do to achieve a serious carbon price apart from asking for it in generic terms? In the run-up to Paris, even the indefatigable optimist Christiana Figueres didn’t seem to think a global carbon price was likely any time soon, if at all, and Tom Burke goes further in suggesting that oil and gas companies are fully aware that they are effectively asking for the impossible (likely impact on fuel prices, huge coordinated effort, resistance from finance ministries) and carrying on with business as usual while waiting for it.
Motivated reasoning is also somewhat apparent in the assessment both of energy demand doubling by 2100 and the still relatively low proportion of renewables in the energy mix by then. These figures are presented dispassionately, but the company has a commercial interest in hoping they are broadly true, which naturally undermines public trust.
At this point, in case I sound like I am talking from a morally superior position, let me say that I am a conscious hypocrite with a high carbon lifestyle. I know that the life I have been privileged to live for the last 39 years — the food, the buildings, the cars, the planes, has depended on fossil fuels. My wife is Indian and we’re flying with our two young boys to see family in Bangalore in July. If I was serious about climate change, some might say I wouldn’t do that, but even with my understanding of the climate challenge, I am not there yet. More generally it’s clear that the world owes coal, oil and gas a debt of gratitude — the quality of life now enjoyed by the many, not the few, has been built through your energy. However, I broadly agree with Lord Adair Turner when he said this:
“I don’t think one should be in any way ashamed if one is part of an institution that previously made money out of fossil fuels….Isn’t it a bit ironic that the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund is leading disinvestment having made all its wealth out of oil? …The answer is no, it isn’t, because the whole of humanity is going to use the benefits of fossil fuels to move beyond fossil fuels.”
Shell seems to agree, at least in principle, but here’s the thing: something happened in Paris in December that fundamentally changes the game. As Christiana Figueres put it: “Political will has arrived.”
Getting real: Beyond ethics and commerce
Two main modalities defined the first few decades after the discovery of climate change — a clash between the values mindset (good and bad, moral and immoral) of environmentalists and the commercial (profits and loss) mindset of key aspects of the capitalist system, including fossil fuel companies, while most people and politicians turned away. Without suggesting any moral equivalence, the extreme commercial mindset actively tried to deny the scientific challenge, and the extreme values mindset tried to overthrow capitalism.
In the last decade or so, despite some legitimate and often compelling doubts (eg Club of Rome’s 1972 Limits to Growth, Tim Jackson’s 2009 Prosperity without Growth) the prevailing view is that these two modalities may not have to be at odds, and actually need each other. The term ‘green growth’ appeared, there are people working on ‘sustainability’ in most major organisations, we hear about triple bottom lines, and there is a pretty serious group of people working towards a New Climate Economy.
What made Paris Cop 21 in particular ‘work’ was the involvement and cooperation of these different modalities; not least the full buy in of the business community in many countries, in a way that didn’t clash with NGOs. For the first time it actually felt like everybody was ‘in it together’. However, I think it’s important to grasp that the union of these two modalities — ethics and commerce- won’t be enough to ensure that the vision of Paris becomes a reality.
The fact that ethics and commerce broadly align looks like a breakthrough, but it may be ‘le faux ami’of our time. On reflection, it’s a little obtuse, because as the Shell Scenario indicates, the path towards 2 degrees, while it can be walked and is achievable in principle, is very narrow indeed, not particularly comfortable and it’s easy to fall off. The critical issue is not so much the need for the energy transition, but the timing and scale of it, and for that, neither values based perspectives nor enlightened commercial perspectives are enough.
To understand timing and scale you need a third modality, not just ethics or commerce but reflexive realism.
Reflexive Realism[v]
“It is a very curious situation. I am taken seriously; indeed a bit too seriously. But the theory that I take seriously and, in fact, rely on in my decision-making process is completely ignored.” — George Soros.
Considering the growing number of reasons to be optimistic and the remaining reasons to be pessimistic, it is worth asking what it means to be realistic. There is no single answer because realism on climate change is plural and perspectival — there are many competing interests and vantage points — but above all it has to be reflexive. Reflexivity is not a term of everyday language but it can be described as acting with awareness of the conditions of action and thereby changing those conditions.
Reflexivity is relevant to any situation with thinking participants. In George Soros’s account of reflexivity, the basic cognitive function of thinking is to understand the world in which we live, but there is also a participating (or manipulative) function that seeks to change the situation to our advantage. When the direction of causation is from world to mind, reality is supposed to determine the participants’ views; but when the direction of causation is from the mind to the world, the intentions of the participants have an effect on the world.
This is the sweet spot of climate realism. ‘World to mind’ is what you get when you read projections by the international energy agency about continued demand for coal or oil, or read the IPCC forecasts; it evokes optimism and pessimism, but it is a passive assessment. ‘Mind to world’, however, is where the higher quality of realism lies, because there is scope to act in ways that change the conditions of action, whether that’s the price of solar or the presumed climate indifference of your political representative.
Soros puts it like this: “These functions often interfere with each other because the independent variable of one function (mind, in world) is the dependent variable of the other (world, in mind) so neither function has a genuinely independent variable, making predictions about human behaviour and the social world radically indeterminate.”
Soros uses this model to explain how pricing distorts market fundamentals because of their role in signalling future value, but the same might be true for humanity’s relationship to energy; if the world acts as if the future will be based on renewables and storage, the chance of it beginning to happen is that much greater. For example, it is estimated that every time the volume of solar power doubles, the cost reduces by about 20 percent, a phenomenon known as ‘Swanson’s law’.
For related reasons, energy and fossil fuel demand projections may not be very reliable. The estimates by the International Energy Association have been challenged by Carbon Tracker for assuming the recent past is a good guide to the near future, and overlooking the scope for more sudden, transformational change. This alternative vision underlies concerns that the global economy contains ‘a carbon bubble’ that could burst, with potential consequences significantly worse than ‘the housing bubble’ that caused a global recession in 2008.
What is often overlooked is that energy is changing from being a hidden resource to be extracted to a technology to be developed, and this matters because technological change is often very rapid. As research from Bernstein financial analysts puts it: “Solar is a technology. Costs fall over time and will continue falling. Fossil fuels are, by definition, extractive. Costs tend to rise over time.”
The world’s leading technological innovators seem to see the transformation that is occurring and the resulting investment opportunities; Google has committed $1.8bn to renewable energy projects and Apple has invested $3bn in solar facilities. Those investments don’t just reflect a reality of renewable energy, they also create it.
The possibility of a more abrupt energy transformation is therefore fundamentally a matter of social reflexivity; about people acting in ways that reflect their understanding of how others may act. If investors believe we can develop batteries that can co-evolve with renewable technologies to make them jointly as reliable at scale as fossil fuels, for example, money will flow that way and the outcome becomes more likely more quickly. If fossil fuel companies come to think their business model will be obsolete in a decade rather than in five decades, they will direct their existing operations towards relatively clean energy much more quickly.
Some questions for Shell:
The theme of the day was questions, so here are some challenging ones that I take from the above analysis.
1. Demand: On energy demand, it is difficult for Shell to be impartial. How do we talk about energy demand that recognises both the inexorable forces (population, economic growth, advertising) that mean that human desire for energy is likely to rise, while also recognising — for instance with smart grids and behavioural design — that this ‘multiplier effect’ should be proactively minimised?
2. Supply: The IEA consistently underestimate renewable energy and have been wrong before. For instance, as Carbon Tracker have indicated, their projection about solar energy in 2015, made in 2000, was 18 times lower than the actual outcome. The past is not always a great guide to the future, and on a singular problem facing humanity as a whole it might be positively unhelpful. More generally, as indicated above, there is a major conceptual distinction not sufficiently acknowledged by Shell. Fossil fuels are extractive; costs rise over time — renewables are technologies — costs lower over time, and their development is not linear but exponential. There is no sense in your scenarios reports that this kind of distinction is fully grasped — it is a matter of no small importance!
To what extent do you grasp that renewable energy is fundamentally different in its socio-technical and investment-return qualities? Can you envisage a rapid expansion that is radically discontinuous with current trends? In a way that meets global power needs? If not, why not?
3. Policy: Leaving the sought-after carbon price (see above) to one side, are you ready for some abrupt changes to the policy environment? For instance, Moody’s — the assessors of credit risk — have announced they will factor in compliance with Paris Cop21 targets. How much might that matter?
And in response to investor pressure and public mood, major fund managers (eg potentially Black Rock) are creating investment portfolios that are carbon neutral. How much might that matter?
You still rely on ‘implicit subsidies’. As Professor Nick Stern puts it: “Make no mistake: freely allowing an activity that imposes severe costs on others is correctly classified as a subsidy.” The IMF calculated that in 2011 this implicit subsidy amounted to about $800 billion globally. More recently, a report by researchers at Cambridge University suggests that when you factor this in, you don’t make any profit at all on most fossil fuels. What happens if this idea of challenging fossil fuel ‘subsidies’ rapidly gains political traction?
Finally, with reflexive realism in mind, is there anything Shell can *do* to make a serious carbon price more likely?
4. Language: How does the language you use help or hinder attempts to rapidly move towards net zero emissions? The role of gas is particularly important in this context. For instance, what does ‘low carbon’ mean? Can gas be called a ‘bridging fuel’ if you are not actively building whatever is on the other side of the bridge? There are many forms of gas, but the environmental impact of fracking (in which Shell is invested) appears to be worse than coal due to Methane release (Harvard paper in Geophysical sciences, March 2016). Will that effect Shell’s continued investment in Shale?
I have the impression Shell has distaste for idea of ‘the carbon bubble’, yet your global scenarios report as far back as 1998 shows that you recognised the limits on fossil fuel extraction and the possibility of stranded assets. Even if you have considered the issue of stranded reserves (and future resources) in your recent scenario report, you do so from the perspective of natural decline rather than acute political pressure, which is increasingly likely as a result of Paris cop21. Is the notion of a carbon bubble something Shell can countenance?
5. Commitment: Your recognition of 2 degree scenario is quite recent and you make little mention of the more exacting 1.5degree scenario. Are these political goals viewed as ethical priorities or constraints on future growth models? If the latter, how do you respond to the claim that ‘your heart is not in it’?
Your own internal carbon price is not applied to the emissions from use of your fuel products, so results in very small per barrel costs that does not impact investment decisions as much as it might (HT Carbon Tracker). Your shadow carbon price, for instance, has not prevented billions from being wasted on oil sands investment or written off in the arctic. What would it take to change the way your internal carbon price is used to assess risk?
6. Technology: On carbon capture and storage your investment position seems to be controversial. CCS projects have extraordinarily high cancellation rates and despite heavy public funding, there is only one CCS-coal plant in operation globally. Shell itself has only invested in two CCS projects around the world, and its CEO said the firm cannot invest more heavily in the technology because shareholders would be unhappy with the low returns. Instead Shell and other oil and gas companies want taxpayer funds to be allocated to an unproven technology. (Hat tip, Charlie Kronick, Greenpeace).
On negative emissions, they appear to be mission critical, and yet there has been completely inadequate investment in total and proportionately. As James Murray of Business Green puts it: “Relying on negative emissions technology to deal with climate change is like eating 20 doghnuts a day because you have heard there might soon be a weight loss pill.”
Even if that point may be overstated, what can Shell do to ensure that CCS and negative emissions technologies are developed more rapidly?
7. Strategy: why not contraction?
A recent report from Carbon Tracker ‘Sense and Sensitivity’ argues that if your commercial goal is to maximise value, when you factor in a range of oil prices and the costs of extaction, the pathway towards maximising value on a two degree scenario may be contraction rather than expansion. Is the idea of a ‘controlled implosion’ or ‘managed decline’ anathema to Shell? Is the only story of progress a growth story?
Conclusions:
There were a few memorable moments and exchanges on the day. The otherwise assured and charming Ben Van Beurden looked uncomfortable while talking about the scope for renewable energy to solve the problems of the developing world. I am not qualified to judge whether this was justified, but it definitely had a ‘thou dost protest too much’ feel to it.
Another curious moment is when I said that, with respect, Shell have a vested interest in increasing energy demand, and Jason Pontin felt this was an unhelpful comment — implying it was somehow delusional to think we could ever seriously curb the growing demand for energy. And yet in some ways this is the heart of the matter…we can’t address the climate crisis only throuh supply-side solutions. How we do it, and how we do it fairly is a much more challenging question.
Finally, I found myself getting a little heated when I said “You don’t get to talk about gas as a bridging fuel unless you are working to build what’s on the other side of the bridge.” It’s a nice line, if I do say so myself, and when saying it I felt it had come from somewhere. On reflection it was a combination of Nick Stern making a similar technical point at an RSA event I hosted, and Bill McKibben saying you don’t get to quote Martin Luther King unless you’re willing to get arrested for what you believe.
My overall impression after preparing for the event and spending time with Shell is this:
1. Shell is completely serious about climate change, determined even, and they know much more about the complexity of the climate challenge than most of their critics.
2. Shell is completely serious about making as much money as possible, and doesn’t really know any other way to operate as a company.
3. While these two goals are not always at odds, they are by no means always aligned either. Shell lacks the cultural and institutional mechanisms to resolve tension and dissonance between these two forms of conviction.
4. Engaging with diverse audiences is therefore a necessary part of the energy transition.
I’m glad I did it!
Dr Jonathan Rowson is Director of Perspectiva, a chess Grandmaster and the author of The Seven Dimensions of Climate Change: rethinking the world’s toughest problem (Forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan 2017). You can reach him on Twitter @jonathan_rowson
Endnotes:
[i] The key Shell policy statement in the most recent Scenario report (note near inside cover) reads(the italics are mine): “It is important to note that Shell’s existing portfolio has been decades in development. While we believe our portfolio is resilient under a wide range of outlooks, including the IEA’s 450 scenario, it includes assets across a spectrum of energy intensities, including some with above-average intensity. While we seek to enhance our operations’ average energy intensity through both the development of new projects and divestments, we have no immediate plans to move to a net-zero emissions portfolio over our investment horizon of 10–20 years. Net-zero emissions, as discussed in this document, is a collective ambition that is applied in the aggregate, with technical and other considerations determining the net-positive or net-negative emissions for any individual industry sector or company. It must be driven by society, governments and industry through an effective overall policy framework for the energy system as a whole, integrating consumption and production. We believe the Paris Agreement is a start towards creating such a framework, and we look forward to playing a role as society embarks on this very important journey.”
[ii] The IEA 450 Scenario is one of the most authoritative accounts of how we can keep the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from rising above 450 parts per million; the level that corresponds roughly to the global agreement to keep global mean surface temperatures from rising above two degrees above pre industrial levels.
[iii] Ashton, J. (2015) Open letter to Shell’s Ben van Beurden from John Ashton. The Guardian, 30 March [Online] Available at: www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/mar/30/open-letter-shell-ben-van-beurden-john-ashton-climate-change
[iv] The i2011 report is still online. It’s called ‘Cabbies, Costs and Climate Change’ and on its own terms the project was a success. Based on our engagement with taxi drivers, some telemetry and extrapolation, the drivers saved over a thousand pounds a year on their fuel bills. The theory was that this was also good for the planet because it would reduce energy demand — an apparent win-win story. But the more I thought about it, the more I considered what had really happened, and reflected on possible rebound effects and unintended consequences, the more I knew in my bones that it had nothing to do with dealing with climate change. If anything it was harmful. At that point I decided I would never work with fossil fuel companies again, based on a visceral feeling — a feeling we need more people to have, including staff within companies like Shell — that if you care deeply about safeguarding our only human habitat, we need to minimise distractions and focus on rapidly changing the type of energy we rely on to live our lives.
[v] Extracted from RSA Report, Money Talks (Rowson, 2015). See ps 22–24 for full references. https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/reports/money-talks---divest-invest-and-the-battle-for-climate-realism
