Barrie's Blog

We've been reading through the sustainability reports of the world's leading beer companies and it got us thinking. Who is leading the way in innovation in the sustainability space in this industry? Is it the big beer companies with their gigantic R&D budgets? Or is it the microbreweries with their ability to design and scale up their products and processes from a relatively blank sheet of paper? But before we attempt to answer that more difficult question, we can give you th

Financial companies play a crucial role in financing the world's economic activities and are also expected to play a major role in financing the global economy's transition to a more sustainable future. Perhaps the most crucial role that banks in particular can play in driving positive change is by shifting their lending portfolio away from less sustainable companies towards more sustainable companies within the same industry. However, as we will learn in this post, it is vit

The consumer electronics industry manufactures and sells the electronic products (phones, laptops, TVs) that we each use in our everyday lives and each of these products has an upstream and downstream carbon footprint that needs to be accounted for by the companies that manufacture and sell the products. Photo by Morning Brew on Unsplash Our analysis has uncovered some surprising results when we compare the disclosed emissions of the leading companies in this sector. Let's di

Today we are going to take a look at the GHG emissions disclosure data we have collected for a sample of 16 companies from the Chemicals  and Specialty Chemicals  industries for the 2022 reporting period. We will also dive into the company-specific emissions disclosures of BASF SE and Dow Inc, two of the world's leading chemicals producers to illustrate how we can use our carbon benchmark data to compare the emissions of an individual company to a peer industry average. BASF

I grew up in a town called Speke in Liverpool, where Paul McCartney lived as a child and which is now the home to John Lennon airport. Before the 1930s, Speke was mainly farmland until it was covered in concrete and redbrick terraced houses creating the largest council estate in the UK. The estate was put there to supply low-cost housing for factory workers. On one side of the estate we had the car factories, a large pharmaceutical plant and the Metal Box factory, where my fa

Central to decarbonization plans of both consumers and heavy industry is an increased reliance on access to clean electricity. In today's post, I interview Chris Warnes from Oliver Wyman's Energy practice covering the challenges that lie ahead for the power sector in reducing their reliance on fossil-fuel power sources. We also drill deeply into the various low-carbon alternatives (renewables, nuclear, hydro, etc), the status of carbon capture technology and the potential rol

Steel production currently accounts for 6-8% of global emissions and demand for steel is forecast to grow as the developing world continues to build out its infrastructure. The industry is generally described as one of the hard-to-abate industries with stubbornly high emissions but so-called green steel now offers some hope that emissions can be reduced even while demand for steel grows. Green steel is made from hydrogen instead of the traditional method of using coke (a deri

I'm generally going to be focusing on what big companies can do to help manage down global emissions, but if we flip the discussion around we can also focus on the end users such as myself that drive emissions through the consumption of products and services. Rather than preaching to readers about what they should be doing differently, I thought it might be instructive to measure my own carbon footprint and see if there is anything we can learn from the exercise. As luck woul

Today I'm going to be digging into all things related to agriculture and land use and the impact this is having on both climate change and biodiversity. The rain forests of Brazil used to be famous for their role in cleaning the world's air but due to deforestation and the repurposing of land for cattle farming and other commercial purposes, Brazil's land mass is now a net-emitter (even before you add in emissions from fossil fuels). In fact there are only a handful of countr

The aviation sector is considered one of the "hard-to-abate" sectors, meaning that there are going to be some major challenges ahead in bringing emissions all the way down to zero. In this post, Robbie Bourke from Oliver Wyman's Aviation team gives a really nice overview on where things stand and what innovations are in the pipeline that could materially move the dial for the industry. If I were to summarize the sector's plans to hit net-zero emissions in one phrase then that

Today we'll be looking at the transition plans of the automotive sector as car and truck manufacturers set out on the road towards net-zero emissions. The auto sector is in many ways well-position for a relatively speedy transition assuming increasing numbers of drivers can be convinced to swap their old gas-guzzling vehicles for an electric equivalent. But as with all others sectors, there are still many obstacles that will need to be overcome to keep the transition plans on

In today's post I talk to David Knipe who used to work in BP's Oil and Gas business and is now part of Oliver Wyman's Energy team and Sustainability platform. While it is clear that we need to wean ourselves off our dependence on fossil fuels, David offers a bit of reality check on the idea that we can immediately switch to a set of alternative energy sources. He offers some practical advice on what the interim stages of the transition might look like. All roads in our discus

In July 2021, the EU revealed its intention to implement a new tax on emissions for goods imported into the EU from outside. The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism  is designed to address the problem of "carbon leakage" caused by emissions-intensive activities being shifted outside of the EU to avoid the costs associated with the EU's cap and trade scheme. As will be seen below, this is going to have a drastic impact on the economics of many sectors and disproportionately aff

The idea that those that contributed least to climate change are likely to suffer the most at the hands of climate change is widely accepted. Wealthier countries have contributed more than their fair share of emissions throughout history and are in a better financial position to help finance the necessary response to deal with climate change. In today's post I interview Rupal Sachdev Kantaria, a Partner at Oliver Wyman and a member of the Oliver Wyman Forum  about issues as d