I'm looking forward to the MIT 2024 Sustainability Summit in Boston on April 26. The topic of the conference is Systems Change, and I'll have the opportunity to (more or less) synthesize the three monographs that, collectively, capture the fruits of the last year and half of development with my Deloitte colleagues.
The first of these monographs, published last year (and which I've been teasing in a series of LinkedIn posts), describes the seemingly intractable nature of corporate scope 3 emissions, and explains how existing carbon accounting tools allow for the estimation of the nature and quantity of the ultimate upstream sources of those emissions. Think of this as a "worm hole" for your supplier engagement efforts, which in turn opens the door to a generalizable method for funding deep decarbonization, which we call "virtual commodity purchase agreements" (VCPAs).
The second, which will drop the week of March 11, explains a system-level theory of change: by targeting support for deep decarbonization in just the right way, we can tip high carbon intensity industries, and move from subsidy-based investment to market-driven transformation. In other words, we can use the "worm hole" to identify high-leverage interventions, enabling companies' supply chain engagement to also drive much-needed large-scale, rapid change.
The third, which (I hope) will be out in time for the conference, looks at the problem from the perspective of the producers of high carbon intensity commodities, showing that we need only subsidize the decarbonization of very little of the economy's total production, for not that long, at relatively little cost.
It's been quite a journey for me: I started my work in climate change in 2017, profoundly worried about what lies ahead, and with no idea how we might effect the necessary change. I'm still profoundly worried; but at least, it seems to me, there is a way forward that leads to a workable, effective, solution.
https://lnkd.in/gCN-egX3
