To begin the activities of Meeting of the Minds in Richmond, California, IEE Executive Director Ed Church was among experts in many fields invited to post his comments in “Dear 2015,” a letter from the future with the premise “The year is 2050. Write a letter to the people of 2015 describing what your city is like, and give them advice on the next 35 years.”
Ed began his post like this:
Dear 2015,
Over the past 35 years, three big factors have had a hand in setting the stage for us in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2050:
- we’ve begun to cut our use of fossil fuels by about 50% toward the necessary 90%;
- we’ve begun to come to grips with limits on natural resources;
- our lives are adaptations to climate change.
And we have found that, amidst the daily challenges, we have what a button from 2015 said, More Fun with Less Stuff.
He ended with a plea to us in 2015:
“We need you in 2015 to finance this transition to the post-carbon society. You started developing “green bonds” for debt financing of energy efficiency, production and storage, as well as for urban buildings and infrastructure. Your next step was to harness positive “impact investing,” equity ownership with a truly triple bottom line. But that didn’t reach scale until 2025. If you had combined impact equity and impact debt to finance the transition in 2015, we could have mitigated more carbon, and begun the process of adaptation much more smoothly.
We look to you, our parents and grandparents to remember the words of Warren Buffett, investor and philanthropist, and one of 2015’s richest people: “Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.“
Thank you, your children and grandchildren in 2050.”
Read the whole post here.