 Good afternoon. It's all very welcome reminder, yes, the first thing which of my self-date to avoid embarrassment if you could put your telephones on silent, please. We will, in terms of the ground rules, many of you will be familiar with the Europe House Convention. Dr. Cameron's presentation will be on the record and the discussion will be sent to the Europe House Conventions. It's my great pleasure to introduce a fellow UCD graduate, your primary degree. Edward did postgraduate work in Master's in the Catholic University in Leuven and his doctoral studies were in a Swedish language institute in Finland, whose name I can't remember. Orbo Academy. Oh, thank you very much. He has considerable European professional experience, but in recent times has been in the United States of America and he brings to us a perspective which is one perhaps that we would always come across about developments. Given the history of the American involvement in the international climate change policy and its leadership role in negotiating the Paris Agreement, I think there are some issues which would be very helpful, I think, if Edward outlines, for instance, a little of the complexity of the American position is that it's not, there's more to it than federal position. Often I can recall the Committee of Governors of Southwestern State, a particularly progressive group there and of course, numbers of cities also are shown considerable leadership in this area. But his theme, American climate leadership in the era of Trump from politics to business, you have the floor. Thank you very much. Thank you everybody for opting to spend your precious time here today for this conversation. I should say by way of housekeeping and ground rules at the beginning that all of the views that I'm about to express are my own personal views. They do not reflect the viewpoint of any particular organization. They do certainly not reflect the viewpoint of any particular government. They are based on an amount of experience which I will relay to you in just a moment. But please feel free to challenge any of that experience. I always find in these types of fora that the richness of what might surface comes from the conversation as opposed to a static lecture. So what I will aim to do is to provide a common foundation of knowledge to everybody in the room, my own particular perspective on what I believe is happening in the United States, but then really encourage everybody in the room to engage not only with questions but with your own viewpoints. I'm very conscious of where I am sitting today and the reservoir and history of expertise that exists within this institute and this building and within this room. So I would encourage everybody to try and make this as conversational as we possibly can. In terms of my own experience, I have spent the past 21 years working on the issue of climate change and particularly the nexus between climate change and other pressing global trends. So the nexus between climate change and development, for example. How do you provide a pathway to prosperity in a climate constrained world? The nexus between climate change and human rights. How do changes to the global climate undermine the realization of human rights and how can strengthening human rights build resilience in individuals and communities in the face of climate change? So what I've always tried to do is work across multiple disciplines, work across multiple issue areas and of course work across multiple geographies. Nobody really knows what I do on a day to day basis. My family still don't understand my job. They think I make the weather. But in fact the simple thing of what I do is I design climate strategies for companies. I help major multinationals to determine how they can go about reducing their greenhouse gas emissions and how they might build resilience into their supply chains. And I try to help public policy makers to build enabling environments that are conducive to and catalytic of climate ambition. So for example with my long-standing friend and colleague Frank, I have been working within the UN process trying to build the global architecture around public policy that would enable us transition from a climate constrained world to a climate compatible world to a world where we have a low carbon climate resilient economy. Now what I'm going to do to you today with you I hope is to tackle four different topic areas. I would like to start by introducing the Paris Agreement. We all know that the Paris Agreement exists but it's often fascinating to me how few people really understand the nuts and bolts of the Paris Agreement. And the first thing that I would say about the Paris Agreement is that it is not just a multilateral environment agreement. It is actually a economic stimulus for the global economy. And I'll reveal why I have come to that conclusion. I then want to move on to assess the Trump Administration in the United States and look not just at the federal government and at the personality of Mr. Trump himself but to look more broadly at what's happening in the US under his leadership. And I have created a series of scenarios funded by a combination of companies and private philanthropies in the United States to try to deconstruct and be specific about the different ways in which President Trump has impact on climate policy in the United States and where that might lead. So I'll share that with you. I then want to talk about new climate leadership to remind people that this is not just a federal government issue. This is not just a public policy issue. This now is a global topic that is multi-stakeholder in nature and as a consequence non-state actors such as businesses have a huge role to play in providing us with the leadership we need to transition to a low-carbon economy. So I'll be talking specifically about what the private sector is doing major multinationals with complex global supply chains and how they're now assuming a leadership mantle in a vacuum that has been created by the federal government. And then finally I'll touch upon some implications for the European Union. Now I just want to start as I always do with some basics about climate change so that we are all starting from the same common position. And I want to first and foremost say that I always explain climate change as being three collisions. The first collision is that we are polluting at an unprecedented scale and we are changing the composition of our atmosphere and our climate system in ways that are unprecedented in human history. In fact as a consequence of land use practices, agricultural practices, energy use, transportation, industrial processes emanating from the industrial revolution and ever since we have now reached a point where the chemical composition of the global atmosphere is at a point that it has not been in 800,000 years. So we are changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere as a consequence of human behaviour. That is subtle science, it is described as being unequivocal the understanding of the changing climate system it is described as being human induced and it is described as being accelerating. In other words we are continuing to add to the changing composition of the climate system. The reason I say this is subtle science is because 97% of all credible scientists accept this position and are therefore providing us with an evidence base to deal with it. I happen to live in a country and we will deal with this in a moment under President Trump where when you turn on the news at night you do not get 97 scientists against three you get one scientist against one contrarian and that gives the viewpoint that this is not a settled debate but it is a settled debate, very important and it is very important to recognise that this science of climate change predates the invention of the toaster so it is actually not terribly complicated. The greenhouse gas effect for example is something that we have known for more than a century and a half and much of the early learning on this issue emanated right here in Ireland. So we do know that this is happening we know why it is happening and now the real issue ought to be what do we do about it. The second thing to say, the second collision is that the changing composition of the atmosphere has substantial implications for biodiversity and ecosystem services all around the globe. So we see for example the changing atmosphere leading to an increase in intensity and frequency of extreme weather event. My in-laws happen to live on the western coast of Florida and they were subjected to five hurricanes within the context of six weeks during the course of the past year. One of those hurricanes cost 80 billion dollars of damage and these are unprecedented as I said in terms of their intensity and frequency. We are also seeing changes in the distribution of water. We are seeing places that are prone to droughts suffering more severe and regular droughts and places that are prone to flooding experiencing those on a more regular basis. We are seeing changes in vector and water borne diseases places like issues like Lyme disease and malaria, dengue fever and yellow fever growing in terms of their reach and growing in terms of their intensity. We are obviously seeing an increase in sea swells, storm surges, coastal erosion and one of the more important things that we are seeing is a change in the chemical composition of the oceans. We are seeing rapid bleaching of coral reef systems and those coral reef systems are home to 25% of all marine life. So that has substantial implications on biodiversity but also of course substantial implications on food. We are seeing changes in the chemical composition of soil and we are seeing disruptions in the patterns of how we go about growing food and consequently dealing with hunger. And then finally, the third collision course is that this is fundamentally a human issue. This is not an environmental or ecological issue. This is not about polar bears, this is not about melting ice caps. This is about where people live, this is about their livelihood. It is about the right to life, it is about mobility, it is about hunger, it is about human rights. As I mentioned at BIC, I have spent a long time working on human rights issues and there are 52 internationally recognized human rights. And climate change undermines the right to food, the right to development, the right to health, the right to a minimum means of subsistence, the right to an adequate standard of living and so on and so forth. That has substantial implications for how we live our lives today and how of course we go on living our lives tomorrow. It also is an issue of fundamental economic importance. Now there are all manner of different types of assessments that have been conducted to try and ascertain what is precisely the amount of financial risk exposure as a consequence of climate change and those all range in the trillions of dollars. The recent and the highest amount that I have read is published in the Journal Nature and it suggested that up to 24 trillion dollars of exposed market value financial assets are at risk as a consequence of our inability to address and move on the issue of climate change. So we are not again just talking about an environmental issue that needs to be dealt with by a department of environment. We are dealing with a fundamental threat to the way we live and a threat to our future prosperity. Now that brings us to the good news which is in the last number of years we have really seriously begun to address this issue as a global community and I want to particularly honour in the room today my colleague as I mentioned earlier Frank who as a member of the Irish Government has worked tirelessly with European Union colleagues for many many years to try and move this agenda forward and we are very lucky within the context of both the Irish Government and the wider European family we have had a tremendous body of leadership over the course of two decades in the face of intransigence from emerging economies in the face of intransigence and changing opinion within the United States. We have had a permanent reservoir of leadership within the context of the European Union on this issue and recently this bore considerable fruit after two decades of effort in fact it was 25 years of effort we landed on the Paris Agreement which was adopted up a gathering of government leaders in Paris at COP 21 in December of 2015 and what I want to talk about very quickly in outlining the Paris Agreement is first of all what are the major outcomes of Paris and why are they important the first thing to say is that we do have for the first time a universal agreement where the global community is committing to a whole series of aspects first and foremost they are committing to holding global temperature rises to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels that's really important because that is the target that has been identified by the best available science as where dangerous climate change truly begins now there's an argument that suggests it begins well before that and there's certainly a lot of evidence to suggest that once we get beyond 2 degrees we're in serious dangerous territory but the important part of the Paris Agreement first and foremost is that commitment to do whatever is necessary to hold global temperatures down what they've also put in place in this agreement is a commitment to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions well before the end of this century that means a fundamental restructuring of our global economy our global energy systems our transport systems our land use systems and so on and all manner of different elements of architecture have been put in place to make sure that every government contributes its fair share to this problem every fine fair share is not something I will go into but for the first time we have what I would call bold collective action by all it's not just you broke it you fix it it's not just you have the resources therefore you should act it's the global community acting in concert in most cases to the limit of each country's capabilities to address this problem now this is fundamentally important because how many issues do we face today where we can truly say that the theocracy in Iran party in China and the Christian democrats in Germany and every political persuasion in between is committed to the science on this issue and committed to acting on this issue very important in addition to the Paris agreement we have something that is not so much equal importance but a very important pointer to the future and that is something called the action agenda and that is where non-governmental actors at least non-state actors I should call them and that means states and provinces and municipalities and the private sector come forward with their own commitments to lead on climate change so again as a consequence of this process we're seeing not just a public policy response we're seeing a societal response to the threat of climate change now there's a couple of things that I want to hone in on the first is the notion of this agreement as being unprecedented this has almost universal buy-in and the almost is of course what we'll get to in a few moments the United States but universal buy-in which is extremely important it also has the breaking down of some long-standing taboos it used to be within the context of the climate negotiations and it used to be within the context of the Kyoto protocol that those countries with the historical responsibility of having created the climate problem and those countries with the financial, technological and other capabilities to address it were the countries expected to act and everyone else was to a certain degree given a free pass that is no longer the case now all countries are expected to make their own contribution and part of that is the feeling that in order to make an ask of someone you increase your credibility if you make an offer and so a whole series of countries led by the small island states the least developed countries and particularly the Latin American countries changed the dynamic in the negotiations by coming forward and saying we will make our own offer we will work to the limit of our capabilities and that will put you in a position where it's very difficult for you not to make an offer in return so very, very important changes to the political nature of the negotiations very important changes in terms of the level of participation what I also want to say and I'm going to give some illustration on this is that the agreement is defining let me move ahead to this because I want to make this point very early on as I said at the very outset this is not just a multilateral environment agreement this is not just the putting in place of environmental policies this is a fundamental restructuring of the global economy and each country that has participated in the Paris agreement has come forward with their own national climate action plans these are called NDCs and we've done a review along with the international energy agency of those national climate action plans and they reveal 13.5 trillion dollars of investments in a clean energy transformation within the next 15 years alone to put that into perspective that is the equivalent of a modern day Marshall Plan which reconstructed Europe after the Second World War so this is a substantial movement of money from the public space but it's also a substantial market signal to companies and financial services companies in particular right around the globe that we are about to build a new economy and as a consequence we see companies beginning to respond to this market signal so important to think of this as being far more than just an environmental agreement but going back to the issue of unprecedented I really want to highlight the fact here on the bottom left that we have 188 countries who have submitted and come forward with their national climate action plans some of these are very robust some of them are not some of them are independently standing some of them are conditional and basically say we will act if you provide us with the finance to act but you still see a level of commitment that was unprecedented in the years prior to the Paris agreement importantly although many people in the environment community will say that the Paris agreement is successful but not enough I would also point to the fact that the architecture of the Paris agreement contains various mechanisms to ensure that countries do not backslide on their commitments and that every five years companies come forward with new commitments that represent quote a progressive increase in their level of ambition so the Paris agreement is not the final destination it is in fact the base camp and we build from that base camp and through the foundations we've laid with each successive round of negotiations we go further and we get closer to that goal of holding temperatures below two degrees celsius one of the things I want to stress upon when it comes to unprecedented ambition is the notion of what is China doing because irrespective of where I go around the world I'm always told it doesn't matter what we do because China does not act on this issue and you cannot trust China and that is a myth that I would like to break with this conversation first and foremost nobody understands climate risk better than China water in China is derived predominantly from glacial melt into Himalayas and the vast majority of Chinese economic infrastructure and population are living in coastal areas susceptible to extreme weather events coastal erosion and salt water intrusion and inundation the economy of China is at great risk if they don't tackle the issue of climate change and importantly there are 300,000 premature deaths in China every year from air pollution and the Chinese Communist Party knows that the single biggest threat to its long-term hold on power is social disruption as a consequence of social and environmental rate down so they are very conscious of environmental risk and as a consequence of that they are very conscious of what needs to be done to build resilience and they are investing at a substantial rate in changing their economy there will be enormous pollution in China and there will be enormous pollution in China for the foreseeable future they are turning small villages into cities of 5, 6, 7 million people and that process of industrialization and urbanization will go on creating environmental problems but the reality is within their national climate action plan is a commitment to increase their share of renewable energy to 20% of the energy mix within again the next 15 years and to put that into perspective that is the equivalent of all the electricity generation in the United States today that's the level of commitment, that's the level of investment that they are embarking on in China so when people say there is no action that is simply a myth we do not have to persuade the Chinese to act on this issue they are persuaded they are acting they are investing in renewable energies more than any other country in the world and they are reaching a position where they are going to be the dominant clean energy superpower of this century as a consequence I'm not going to bother you with this graph I just always feel when you are presenting climate change you need to have some sort of impenetrable graph that cannot be possibly understood the only thing that I do want to say about the graph is that before the Paris Agreement we were headed towards a 4.8 degree Celsius world at 4 degrees Celsius the major crops that we depend upon for our staple food cannot grow wheat, maize, corn, rice and so on so we were headed for catastrophe we are now headed to somewhere between 2.8 and 3.2 degrees Celsius of temperature rises as a result of the Paris Agreement so first and foremost we have created inroads into this problem second much work needs to be done but thirdly and very importantly a new economy is created in that space between 4.8 and 2.8 degrees Celsius that we must always be mindful of and we must begin to talk about this transition as one of opportunity and not one of sacrifice and burden now that starts to bring us on to the issue of the United States therefore I start to say some mildly critical words about President Trump what I do want to first and foremost acknowledge is that the Paris Agreement was made in the United States and so one of the great tragedies of the position of the new administration in some ways mirroring the great tragedy of some of the positions taken in the UK on Brexit is that an awful lot of what they're running from are things that they themselves created the United States was fundamental in a number of key ways but what I want to really hold in on is first of all much of the architecture was developed and designed not just by the US federal government but by research institutes and civil society actors located in the United States second of all the political capital that was the backbone of the Paris Agreement was a consequence of a bilateral relationship between China and the United States built up over a period of two years and during that time I was told repeatedly that the climate was the number one area of bilateral cooperation between the two of them in terms of priority but also the number one area of cooperation in terms of prioritization and it was really this cemented bilateral relationship between the US and China that enabled all of the other countries to come along also because Chinese leadership was present the other emerging economies and developing countries were willing to come along because the US were involved we had of course political momentum that only comes as a consequence of the US president and his state department so there was a great deal of momentum and favorable political wins created as a consequence of US buying and US leadership of this particular issue and that is one of the reasons why we now get on to the sadness of what has begun happening in Washington as of late on this particular issue this first graphic I think illustrates the degree of loneliness and political isolation facing the US as a consequence of being the only sovereign state in the world that is withdrawing from the Paris agreement a couple of months ago this particular image would have had slightly more comfort for the US because Nicaragua and Syria were also on the left hand side of that particular image Nicaragua were on the US side because they felt the Paris agreement was nearly ambitious enough and Syria was on that side because they did not have a functional government capable of ratifying the Paris agreement so that simply leads you with the United States now the United States of course have given and President Trump has given all manner of reasons for why he and his administration would like to remove themselves from the Paris agreement one of the reasons being that it is deeply unfair on the United States that isn't true because it was built in the United States it was built using architecture that the United States wanted and it broke the single most important political taboo that had been the preoccupation of successive US administrations for decades and that was the discrepancy between what a country like America needed to do and what a country like China needed to do so the concept of the Paris agreement being unfair is fundamentally flawed of course the second reason for wanting to pull out of the Paris agreement was an attempt to resuscitate the coal industry in the United States and a feeling that the Paris agreement was going to signal the final death mail for coal in the United States the reality is that coal has been dying in the United States for decades nothing to do whatsoever to climate change nothing to do whatsoever with international climate governance but more related to the fact that mechanization has been ongoing and rapid within the coal sector leaving a massive amount of people unemployed and simply because the price point of coal is far higher and not so competitive anymore when compared to the price point of alternatives there has been an energy revolution in the United States in the past decade tracking and the availability of natural gas providing cheap alternatives and secure alternatives to more polluting fossil fuels such as oil and coal so his argument that he is doing this because he is going to resuscitate the coal industry does not hold but in addition to that as he's pulling out of the Paris agreement he's also shutting down what's called the Appalachian Economic Commission which is precisely the same body in the United States that is supposed to inject new funds and new life into rust-belt states and coal communities in particular so what he is seeming to give with one hand the coal communities he is taking away with the other hand so therefore there is no logic behind that particular position the only possible rationale that therefore exists for why the president is embarking on this particular issue is because of the hold of campaign finance on elected office in the United States which is unfortunately staggering and that's a very important lesson to bear in mind because it could be that the secret to US climate action is not a climate policy it's a supreme court judgment called citizens united which is about the amount of finance that flows into American elections and puts a disproportionate amount of power into a very very small and powerful donor base and that donor base often consists of lobbies that are very much aligned with fossil fuels and with high emitting sectors so the only possible rationale why this is happening is because there is a need to align with that donor base not only within the administration but unfortunately more broadly within the republican establishment of the United States now what we have tried to do over the course of the last number of months since the election in November 2016 is determine what might happen as a consequence of all of this and more importantly how might we respond so I was funded by a group of private sector facing organizations and also a group of private philanthropies in the United States to try and think through what are the likely scenarios of a Trump administration and how worried should we actually be and that's an important question because President Trump is loved far more than he deserves by his opponents by his followers but he's hated far more than he deserves by his opponents which is very very important to bear in mind there is a sort of a liberal hysteria in the United States right now about everything that Donald Trump does and like any human being he has his strengths and his weaknesses so what we wanted to do is to try and have an impartial dispassionate assessment as to what he might do on this particular issue so we broke down the areas where he has influenced into three categories decarbonization which means what might happen in the real economy diplomacy which means how might he have an impact on the UN system but more broadly on the actions that he might take and then finally discourse what might he do to the tenor of public reasoning and debate in the United States that might make it more difficult for the science to be accepted that might make it more difficult for the general public at large to understand and begin to respond to this issue and we looked at two different potential categories for what might happen one of them we called put the brakes on and one of them we called pulling the wheels off we did not think that there was a third scenario for Trump but we did think that putting the brakes on might involve for example returning to the eight years of George W. Bush where the United States was not actively leading on this issue was quite hostile to certain elements of this particular topic but they were not capable of that particular moment of undermining what everyone else was doing the results that we came to and I'm very happy to share the detailed analysis with anybody who's interested this is public domain information provided by a private philanthropy in the U.S. was that the nature of the damage very much depended on which of these issues and very much was dependent on a time scale so I'm not going to go into all of this in great detail but I really do want to use this graphic to highlight the difference between the obvious damage that can be done and the less visible damage that can be done so if you take decarbonization for example we've said that what is likely to happen on decarbonization is putting the brakes on in other words some of those public policies that incentivize decarbonization might be repealed some of the incentives we need to speed up decarbonization may not now be forthcoming but the real economy is decarbonizing because of the consumer demand because of shareholder activism because of the price point of renewables versus fossil fuels and for all manner of other reasons so yes he can slow down momentum on this particular issue domestically in the short term but not completely pull the wheels off you'll see that once we get out of the medium and long term however we have a different perspective of this and the reason for that is because of the less obvious all of the authority of the federal government in the united states right now to lead on climate change rests on a supreme court judgment from 2007 called massachusetts versus EPA and this basically says that greenhouse gases are a pollutant and therefore the environmental protection agency has an obligation to deal with those pollutants that provides the president with something called executive authority to put in place various policies to regulate and reduce greenhouse gases but president trump over the course of the next four or eight years has the capacity to change the composition of the supreme court the supreme court right now is a five to four court but it's very very easy to imagine that it might become a six three or even seven two court during the lifetime of a trump administration and there's a perverse climate joke in the united states right now that the most important climate activist in the entire country is Ruth Bader Ginsburg's doctor because she has that doctor has to keep her alive because if you begin to lose these more liberal leaning justices who are all eighty years into both either through retirement or ill health during the next four to eight years you could have a very different supreme court and that different supreme court not only underpins president trump's view on climate change it could potentially prevent any future president from exercising executive authority on this particular issue so it's not just about what climate policies he's put in place it's about his capacity to alter the basic governance structure of the united states that enables anybody to act which is really important and as I said I'm happy to make this analysis available to anybody who wants to have it on this particular slide the only thing that I want to draw your attention to maybe two things is that there's a policy dimension and there's also a budgetary dimension because one of the things that the president has done in his budget submission to congress he has defunded all of the various action that is going to happen on climate change he's defunded research he's defunded technological innovation he's defunded public relations and information campaigns he has defunded the green climate fund and the green climate fund is the international financial mechanism established in paris to transfer wealth from the industrialized countries to emerging economies and help aid their transition to a low carbon economy 30% of that fund comes from US funds 30% of the capitalization of the fund is dependent on US contributions he has put a halt to that which means either we will be facing a smaller fund or we will be facing a need for for example the European Union to cough up additional money and put into that fund beyond the money needed to lubricate the transition to a low carbon future that money is also important as a lubricant for the global deal because a lot of the promises we've made over the course of the last number of years is if you promise to decarbonize we will provide you with the money to help you get there and if that money is not forthcoming that political consensus so part one and then the other issue I want to point to on this particular slide is the issue of public reasoning we see across many different topic areas in the United States a poisoning of the public discourse whether it's on healthcare, on guns on issues related to climate change it is becoming very tribal and it's reaching a point where if you have a settled view on an issue it becomes very very difficult for your mind to be changed and the President's administration is changing the public interfaces with the issue of climate to the point where he is removing all reference of climate change from government websites and there are even some governors in the United States who will not allow the term climate change to be used in any document produced by any particular agency of that government strangely enough the Governor of Florida which is extremely susceptible to extreme weather events and is extremely high risk when it comes to climate change he will not even permit the term climate change to be used in meetings let alone in written reports so this is a very dangerous time in terms of public reasoning now that brings us to towards the end which again is a returning to a good news story and that is what is happening with climate leadership in a vacuum that's being left behind by the federal government and I want to really specifically call out the momentous change we've seen in the private sector when I started working on environmental issues 20 years ago they were neutral or often hostile to anything we tried to do on environment when you had a visit from a company it was usually to slow you down or to undermine what you were trying to do that's fundamentally changed on the issue of climate I think in the last number of years of course there are still heavily fossil fuel dependent companies who are doing everything they can to resist this particular agenda and some of them are doing a true nefarious means I happened to know for example of a famous company related to the aviation industry people susceptible to its viewpoint on various national delegations at the Paris conference simply to reject anything that might come up on aviation so there are still many companies out there who are not playing their part but the whole community within the private sector as a whole has begun to shift and this particular slide I think gives you an illustration of why that's important in terms of volume so one of the things I've been involved in in the last four years was creating a coalition called We Mean Business a series of private sector facing organizations and the thousands of companies they work with across 10 different industrial sectors coming together to try and mobilize companies from the very global multinationals down to the small and medium size enterprises to lead on this issue and as of today we have 587 companies who together have a total revenue in excess of $8 trillion and close to 200 investors who manage over $20 trillion of assets and they have collectively made close to 1200 different types of climate commitments these are commitments to 100% renewable energy procurement to ending deforestation in their supply chain to setting an internal carbon price and advocating for public carbon pricing to aligning the work of government affairs with the work that's being done in the sustainability department of a company which is often quite a challenge and a total of 11 different commitment areas that collectively represent huge volumes of ambition and I'll tell you a little bit about two of them specifically in just a moment but in addition to that what we see is the largest sector largest private sector employer in the world Walmart recently came out and made its own science-based emissions reduction target meaning it's aligning its own trajectory with the Paris Agreement and the commitments governments have made importantly what Walmart also did was that they announced that in future doing business with Walmart if you were a company and if you're one of its top 100 suppliers is to take on board a science-based target of your own so they are saying to their suppliers our choices will no longer simply be about the lowest cost product you can offer us it's now going to be about environmental integrity and that has huge ramifications right throughout multi-nationals and global supply chains second of all and very interesting is that when the CEO of Walmart decided to make this announcement he did not make it at an environmental conference he did not make it at a conference of retailers he made it at a conference called Net Impact which is aimed specifically at millennials and when he was asked why are you making that announcement here he said my consumer base is dying and I need millennials who value purpose and mission and who want to feel pride in what they buy I need them to shop at Walmart and the way to do that is to align my values and our corporate values with what we see growing values within the millennial generation so very interesting to see that the motivation for why they do this is not simply altruism it's not only to respond to regulation it's because the business case for action is growing I recently did a review of 64 different business risk vectors and if you look at those business risk vectors they all point to the need for self-interest to be serious about climate risk and to be progressive on climate ambition second major point here is the four largest companies by market capitalization in the world took the unprecedented step of submitting briefs to the Supreme Court in the United States in defense of the Clean Power Plan when the Trump administration decided to undermine it very very significant piece of action now very very briefly I talked about some of these 11 initiatives I simply wanted to demonstrate again their scale and the level of buying the science based target emissions initiative is now one of the largest private sector initiatives on climate change there are more than 300 companies around the world who have submitted plans and are now awaiting verification and accreditation you can see from the graphic that some of these are the most well known brands in the world Walmart I've already mentioned Unilever is the largest consumer products companies in the world they have very very substantial and deep supply chains which means when they take a commitment to reduce their emissions it has implications for what happens in China Bangladesh and Vietnam and anywhere where they source goods, services and materials from and then interestingly which I think is something that Ireland should really begin to take notice of is a whole series of companies have signed up to something called RE100 which is a commitment to source all of your energy from renewable sources the reason why this is important for Ireland is because these companies are now making decisions based on where they locate based on the availability of renewable energy sources so for example in North America right now the province of Quebec in Canada is going around to these different companies and saying if you want renewable energy and you can't get it in Alabama then we suggest you relocate your data centre to Quebec because we have an abundance of hydropower and we can give you that power so they are using their own accelerated transition to a low carbon future as a spur for economic development to attract inward investment and high paying jobs that come along with that one of the things that I want to leave you with with regards to business leadership on climate and our own leadership on climate writ large is that we must be dynamic in our leadership we cannot rest on our laurels we cannot say Walmart for example we have done enough because we have adopted a science based target because we still have a great deal of work to do if we are to be successful in managing climate risk and building an inclusive low carbon economy that is the graphic that I like to put up because what we now need to do in the United States is not just put in place targets it's to win the conversation to win the argument we need to take what has become a tribal and partisan debate and to turn it once again into bipartisan leadership one of the tragedies of President Trump's position on this issue and of the Republican Party's veering to the right on this issue is that there is a tremendous history and legacy of environmental stewardship and leadership within the Republican Party starting with Theodore Roosevelt in the establishment of the National Park Systems to President Nixon establishing the Environmental Protection Agency to President Bush the first actually signing up to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change this did not used to be a Democrat versus Republican issue this used to be a bipartisan consensus that irrespective as to whether you are a wealthy financier in the northeast of the United States you had a right to a safe and secure and prosperous environment and that is no longer the case so one of the things we have to do if we want to succeed on this issue is we've got to remove the toxic nature of the conversation and we've got to start appealing to those people who don't agree with us that could very easily start with a company like Walmart because as this map illustrates Walmart is the largest employer in many states around the nation in addition to that the vast majority of the people who shop at Walmart are low income populations and many of the people who shop at Walmart are voting Republican and voting Trump so one of the things we are trying to say to Walmart is why don't you supplement your science based targets initiative with an information and communication campaign to your consumers so that they understand this issue they understand why you are leading on this issue and you are equipping them with what they themselves can do in their ordinary lives to be leaders in their own right if this is the next frontier of climate leadership in the corporate world it's about for example a company like Marks and Spencer's understanding that the bulk of their workers are women that women are disproportionately impacted by climate change that the bulk of their shoppers are women so let's talk about gender sensitivity in climate policies and strategies from a company like Marks and Spencer's and yet let's use their brand to reach this constituency to persuade them to be actors and leaders the briefest and the final slide because I'm actually leaving this up on the screen as part of our conversation I do believe that there are implications for the European Union in all of this not least is the fact that the EU has previously carried the can for climate leadership at times when the US has vacated that position we know that that happened during the Kyoto Protocol we know that Kyoto was also designed by the United States and also orphaned by them so there is a sense of history repeating itself and there may again be the need for a European leadership role I'm very happy to see that already that is emerging through the bilateral relationship that the EU is building with China but I do have a worry that when Brexit happens possibly the final civil service I've ever worked with is leaving the European Union and it's a civil service that has been leaving many of the climate briefs in really a sterling fashion over the course of many, many years to assume a leadership role at precisely a moment when it's losing one of its most important climate assets there's also of course implications for what might happen with the need for the EU to come forward with financing and of course there is a danger that if the US backtracks on some of its commitments that that will simply inspire a country like Poland to come forward and say why should we carry the can we're already reluctant to lead on this issue with the Commission as well so there are all matter of implications on this particular issue but I sit in Vermont you sit in Dublin you can probably educate me on the implications far more than I can do for you so maybe I will just end there and I'm very happy to take any comments challenges or questions