I was recently joined by Kiff Gallagher, Executive Director of Global Heat Reduction Initiative. We discussed the Tipping Point study finding the world facing irreversible damage, and how the Global Heat Reduction Initiative is providing critical data to drive mitigation investments where they matter most.
Jeff Gitterman: Hi, and welcome to the Impact on FinTech TV down on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. I’m your host, Jeff Gitterman, and I’m joined today by Kiff Gallagher, executive director at Global Heat Reduction. Kiff, thanks for joining me here today.
Kiff Gallagher: It’s great to be here, Jeff. Thank you.
Jeff Gitterman: So we always do a thing on the show, a little bit about your background, but most importantly, why impact, why climate, why you’re working on these things instead of out making real money.
Kiff Gallagher: Tell you, man, I’m scared. I don’t know about you. I live in Washington, D.C. Eight days last year we couldn’t leave the house. We were advised not to leave the house. I didn’t grow up that way. We used to have seasons. I have a 10-year-old boy. I truly am worried not just about the future, but the present, the very near term, let alone the long term. So I just thought time is all we have, and I’d like to dedicate it to this.
Jeff Gitterman: So talk to me about the problems with how we’re counting climate change right now and the factors that might be missing into the forward-looking models that we’re doing.
Kiff Gallagher: Yeah. Well, a lot of people don’t understand that roughly half of global warming is driven by not CO2, not carbon. It’s driven by so-called super pollutants, often short-lived climate pollutants, but pollutants like methane, low-level ozone, HFCs, nitrous oxide, and black carbon. These are orders of magnitude more potent than CO2 in terms of driving heat.
Carbon markets are all about slowing the rate and cooling the planet, slowing the rate of warm and cool. But we’re failing to measure those pollutants that do so most intensely.
Jeff Gitterman: So why is the big battle in climate change and carbon accounting and other things all focused on CO2? Why are we missing the boat on these other pollutants?
Kiff Gallagher: Well, that’s right. It’s CO2-centric, I think because at the Paris Agreement, they needed a unit of account. They didn’t know how fast the planet was going to warm. It’s gone faster than even the most aggressive scientific estimates. And because CO2 has been in the atmosphere for centuries, it’s virtually there forever until you remove it or until nature draws it down.
They thought this would make sense. So the unit of account is called CO2 E, and E is the equivalent over a hundred-year period. So the unit is actually measured in GWP 100, that’s the global warming potential of carbon over a hundred years. And then they figured, we’ll put all these other emissions in that basket as well because it can contain them.
The problem is you’ve created a false equivalency when it comes to heat. So for that, you need a near-term measuring stick. We don’t have a hundred years, everybody knows that. So we are not measuring what matters most right now.
To catch the full conversation, you can watch my interview with Kiff Gallagher.
More Fintech TV: Bringing impact investing strategies to private markets
