From Tel Aviv to Palo Alto, New York to London, entrepreneurs have created in the last handfuls of years an eclectic arsenal of innovations that are already beginning to show their mettle in the battle against climate change, as well as their potential to help the bottom lines of a wide swath of businesses. Many of these innovations currently fly inches, or miles, below the radar of public and governmental awareness. Yet the climate change needle could well be nudged if such disparate technologies were properly shared, engaged, supported and leveraged on a global scale. Global leaders in tech, government, business and beyond can help. Seeking, promoting, supporting and engaging existing innovations, on a large scale, is the sort of aggressive action that our time and planet require. If a subset of political decision-makers must spend their time arguing and denying, blaming and stonewalling while Antarctica sweats, so be it. But in the meantime, technologies that can benefit both businesses and the climate change battle are here now, working and waiting. For the sake of the rest of us, they must be activated, globally and with great force.
Today’s young people can and should hold their parents’ generation to account for their present actions. They can elicit an emotional response that can motivate action. If thinking about the lives of unborn future generations seems too abstract to motivate you to act, try instead looking a young child or grandchild in the eye and asking yourself what sort of future you are leaving for them. There is something that, on reflection, many adults would surely find repugnant in the idea that they will leave their children a damaged planet that will radically affect their life possibilities. Lord Nicholas Stern
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