Heidi VanGenderen is a third-generation Colorado native who served as the state’s first gubernatorial climate advisor. She has worked on energy and climate issues in the nongovernmental organization, public, academic, and private sectors and recently completed the Chevening Fellowship in Edinburgh and London.

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“Climate change is like the Internet. It’s getting bigger every year, it’s not
going away, and you need to figure out how to make money from it.”
This entrepreneurial observation comes from Paul Dickinson, cofounder
and executive director of the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) in London.
The CDP is a nonprofit organization that has amassed the “largest database
of corporate climate-change information in the world.” The CDP issues questionnaires
to companies of all stripes, and the responses can be accessed
by essentially anyone, including institutional investors, governments, and
individuals. In a world in danger of being filled with too much information,
CDP’s database is information that can matter, because it can and does help
guide investment decisions. And that is one key strategy in our ability to
meet both the challenges and the opportunities of climate change.
We who are fortunate enough to reside in the western United States
know challenge well. We live on unforgiving lands, and, by god, we can
face adversity and come through whatever comes at us because we are self-reliant.
We are rugged individuals who also can demonstrate an entrepreneurial
flair. When it comes to climate change, can and will we apply both

of these traits? Will we do so, in part, by reaching beyond the borders of our own well-loved region to learn what is working elsewhere so that we may borrow and adapt good ideas?

Awareness and acceptance of the human ability to alter the Earth’s
atmosphere clearly differs around the planet. I know this better now through
the opportunity to gather in an international fellowship thanks to the British
Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Fourteen of us representing eleven dif-
ferent countries listened, learned, and debated solutions to climate change
through the lens of finance and investment.

The perspectives from colleagues, and now friends, from China, India,
Malaysia, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Turkey, South Africa, Canada, Australia, and
Indonesia vastly expanded my personal horizons. Because we were based
at the University of Edinburgh, with several forays to London, one of the
world’s premier finance capitals, we were treated, in particular and under-
standably, to a UK perspective.

For starters, the public presence of climate change is greater in the
United Kingdom than in the US and most certainly far greater than, say,
in Kazakhstan. Whether on the British Broadcasting Corporation television
news in the debate over whether another runway should be added at Heath-
row, in product labels, in public displays in museums, or in ads everywhere,
the direct topic of climate change and the imperative to reduce carbon emis-
sions is a much greater part of the UK’s lexicon than that of the US. We in
America are more likely, perhaps, to use the phrase global warming than in
the UK, as they seem to use climate change nearly exclusively—but we are far
less direct in our address of the topic overall than those in the UK.
Consumer labeling is an evident strategy in the UK. The supermarket
chain Tesco, for example, has taken the initiative to list the amount of car-
bon dioxide emitted in the production and distribution of some of the prod-
ucts it sells so that concerned consumers can use this information in their
purchasing decisions.