We can’t innovate our way out of the climate crisis

OPTIMISM, especially about our ability to solve big problems, is in brutally short supply these days.

The gloom might be at its worst in the climate change arena, where the Trump administration is in the middle of an all-out assault on green energy and the world is poised to miss the Paris Agreement target of limiting warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Given that backdrop, I was struck by Bill Gates’ recent announcement of a major – and decidedly optimistic – shift in his thinking about climate change.

“We’ve made great progress” on addressing global warming, he wrote, and he’s confident that the changing climate “will not lead to humanity’s demise”. But it’s time to shift our attention from cutting near-term emissions to investing in ways to “improve life in a warming world”.

Doing so, according to Gates, will require us to “focus on innovation”.

Ensuring that global warming doesn’t exterminate humanity strikes me as a terribly low bar. I’d like our children to say that our generation left them a world better than the one we inherited, not just “I’m glad we’re not all dead”.

Unfortunately, that goal is becoming harder and harder to reach, and technological innovation alone won’t be enough to get us there.

Innovation is an enormously powerful tool – often the best one we have. But it works best on problems where a single breakthrough can have a massive impact.

Consider, for example, how effective it’s been in areas such as public health, where one new drug or vaccine has sometimes been enough to eliminate a disease. These solutions are developed and even manufactured by relatively small numbers of highly skilled people. Technology handles that kind of problem superbly.

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Climate change, with its multiple causes, diverse impacts and global reach, is very different. Handling its effects can’t be outsourced to a small group of experts.

To better understand what innovation can and can’t do to help us through the climate crisis, I reached out to Spencer Glendon.

I’ve known Glendon for more than a decade, since he gave a talk about his research at Harvard Business School while I was a professor there. He’s the former director of investment research at Wellington Management and is now the founder of Probable Futures, a non-profit that strives to make climate science accessible and understandable to everyone.

Our central task in dealing with climate change, Glendon says, is “to manage the unavoidable and avoid the unmanageable”. What makes that so hard is that climate change isn’t just one issue, he explains; it has worked its way into every facet of our world.

So while an innovative technology might help, say, farmers struggling with a climate that no longer supports the types of crops they’ve been growing for decades, that same breakthrough is unlikely to do anything for the school superintendent down the road who’s wondering what to do about the way heat hurts kids’ health and cognition, or the homeowner who can’t sell her property because no bank will issue a 30-year mortgage in an area newly prone to flooding.

That doesn’t mean innovation has no role in responding to climate change. But the way we need to innovate isn’t just technological, but in how we think.

“Virtually every decision we make depends on assumptions about the climate, even if we don’t realise it,” says Glendon.

When you build a house or buy a municipal bond or plan a ski holiday, you are building on those assumptions. And “the climate has been so stable for so long we mostly assume nothing will change”, he says. So, what happens when it does?

We need to shift from implicit beliefs about the climate to explicit models built on the best science. And we need to feed those models into decisions that we would normally think to have nothing to do with the weather – everything from mortgage underwriting to the grade of asphalt used to pave roads.

How can leaders succeed in this new reality?

“Good leaders will ask ‘What climate conditions are we assuming now and in the future?’ whenever they make a decision,” says Glendon. “The good news is that we have a good forecast of how local climate conditions will change. Decision-makers of all kinds don’t need to be climate experts, but they need basic climate literacy.”

That mindset shift is among the most difficult – and surely the most important – leadership challenges of our time. As we think about our New Year’s resolutions, my suggestion for leaders and for everyone who wants to be one is just that: Make 2026 the year you get climate literate. BLOOMBERG

The writer writes about corporate management and innovation. He teaches leadership at the Yale School of Management and is the author of Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter