As we sift through the positioning for the upcoming COP26 meeting and the attention focusing report from the IPCC this week, it is a reasonable question to ask what this means for the plastic waste issue. If governments, lobbyists, and activists are likely to be more focused on climate change action over the next few years, which seems to be a reasonable conclusion, will there be the bandwidth for plastic waste? The plastic waste issue is less open to interpretation than the climate change issue and is a visible problem for all, but if governments need to prioritize where they spend their incremental dollar, and/or where they provide incentives of penalties, the climate is going to be pushed to the front of the line in our view. Plastics producers will have to deal with emissions, like any other industrial user of power and heat. The risk is that local governments, looking for revenue to support climate initiatives see taxing virgin plastic (or unrecycled plastic) as a way to both push plastic waste initiatives forward and raise revenue. Adding a plastic tax in the US to the superfund proposal in the infrastructure bill would be hitting the chemicals industry from two sides and would give bodies like the ACC far more grounds for pushback. For more on the IPCC analysis see our ESG & Climate Change report from this week.
The IPCC (UN) report is all over every news outlet and its content and the ramifications of the analysis will be the core of our ESG and Climate piece tomorrow – in the Exhibit below we show a chart that was republished by the BBC which looks at projections around sea level increases. While the UN report has compelling academic and government backing and is certainly the most coordinated analysis on climate change, it is still littered with “most likely” and “more likely” comments, suggesting that the projections are still shrouded in uncertainty. There is a very good chart that shows “observed” climate change data over the last 50 years, and the ranges around the primary causality (human versus natural) conclusions are significant, suggesting that different models are telling very different stories, some less scary than others.