Urgency of climate risks lost for many participants at World Economic Forum
"In Davos, Big Business Sends Mixed Signals on Climate Amid Calls for Carbon Pricing", 25 Jan 2016
Feike Sijbesma, CEO of…Royal DSM, was…at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. "You must be really blind if you don't see that we are at a tipping point and into a transition," he said, referring to the shift from a fossil fuel economy to a renewable one…Few of the more than 300 discussions in Davos touched on climate risk…More than a thousand major companies and investors now advocate a price on carbon…For many delegates to the WEF, however, the urgency was lost…The oil and gas sector has taken…hits in the past two years - first, when…shareholders concluded that oil-and-gas companies would have to write off reserves…and then when prices plunged over the last year…Stuart Gulliver of HSBC warned that much of the developing world would remain dependent on coal for the near future, and urged companies to engineer a thoughtful transition…[Also refers to IKEA and Total.]