Alpesh Patel OBE, CEO in Asset Management, Media Commentator, International Best-Selling Author and Philanthropist, former visiting fellow in Business, Oxford University and Asian Voice’s regular columnist who brings you Political Sketchbook & Financial Voice, talks extensively about climate change in this Q&A.
How do the current sociopolitical economic challenges affect climate change?
A lot of attention, particularly public attention is focused of course, on the war in Ukraine. That means that the same public attention is not focused on making sure politicians' feet are kept to the fire. That's a key problem. When the world gets around having its attention as it did during COP26 to a particular issue, governments move. When governments think they're not being watched, they tend not to move.
However, there is one slight positive, which is this. The conflict with Russia, certainly for the Western governments, if you consider which are the most polluting; China, EU, US. For Western governments, that move away from relying on Russian oil should mean the EU, UK, US will be less reliant on hydrocarbons oils. UK has very little reliance on Russian oil and gas, and similarly to the US, very little reliance. But it's surely for the EU, it might lead to a shift in the EU more towards climate benefiting sources of fuel, right?
Where and when do you think the human species went wrong in the assessment of climate change and its adverse impact?
I think there was an area where we went wrong and there's an area when even though we could have gone right, we continued choosing to go wrong. And it's this, first of all, to some extent you can't blame us if we don't have the data. When I look at the data on the NASA website and I like going to the NASA website, okay? Basically, the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide had never been above the 1950s level for millennia. And we know this because we can dig up old fossils and you can tell the carbon content of the air at that time when those fossils were fossilized, so from thousands of years ago.
I think you got to be pretty off your face if you think NASA data is somehow just manufactured artificial political unless you're a flat earth supporter. In which case you definitely don't believe in NASA's data. So that's the basis where I go, where did we go wrong? Well, we have the denies which still exist. And thankfully, they have a weaker force in government.
Governments are notoriously bad at colluding and creating cartels as the numbers grow bigger. You could probably create a formula and say, "The more governments are involved, the less law likely that collusion will hold." OPEC is ironically enough one of the best-known cartels in the world, and even they get people cheating as it were. Simple so, what's the problem? Self-interest is. We're, as I said, we don't have a united government of the world. We have nation-states.
So how can UK-India work together?
What will happen going forward between UK-India is, of course, shared knowledge on the technologies that we need. India has a problem in that it doesn't make enough solar panels domestically of sufficiently high quality. Britain can help with that. Britain has a problem with carbon extraction technology, which India's rather good at. We've brought companies like carbon clean solutions from India over to the UK using their intellectual property out there and they've been phenomenal. So I think that partnership of knowledge sharing will be tremendously useful, plus India needs a lot of capital and the UK financial markets are very good at raising capital.
I think Britain can help whether it's green bonds or just raising capital for its companies in the conventional sense through the London markets. And as I said, the UK is very good at that.
How can the Asian community contribute towards building a better or more sustainable future amid solving the climate crisis?
I think going back to that old attitude that our parents had when they first came to this country and when money was so tight, that you didn't just throw away clothes, you didn't just keep buying new ones, you didn't have fast fashion. You did recycle and reuse and relabel and repurpose.
