Beyond the Doomsday Scenario

The trouble with climate argument is that it often sells the worst case as the baseline case. That is more or less what happened with RCP8.5, a severe emissions scenario that gradually entered public debate as though it were the default future.

Scenarios were never meant to function as prophecy. They are tools for thinking about risk, built around assumptions about population, energy use, technology and policy. Their value lies not in predicting the future with precision, but in helping governments and businesses think through the range of futures they may have to navigate.

When scientists began moving away from RCP8.5 as the default storyline, critics pounced.

For some, including the 47^th POTUS, it became proof that climate warnings had always been overstated. Although many reasonable people would reject that conclusion, the episode should still prompt a more sober question about how the climate case has been argued.

Too much climate communication has leaned on the most frightening version of the future. Catastrophe became the preferred register. It is now a weaker basis on which to carry the argument, especially with businesses that must make decisions under real economic constraints.

The case for climate action now has to stand on harder ground: competitiveness, energy security, industrial capability, resilience and productivity. Net zero cannot keep all its eggs in the basket of the most alarming scenario. It has to answer a more serious question. What kind of economy do we want to build as energy systems, technologies and trade patterns change?

The answer is less simple than many sustainability panels suggest.

Global energy investment reached USD3.3 trillion in 2025, according to the International Energy Agency, with around USD2.2 trillion flowing into renewables, nuclear, grids, storage, low-emissions fuels, efficiency and electrification. That is twice the USD1.1 trillion going into oil, gas and coal.

Yet the world is not decarbonising in the way the slogans imply. Energy-related carbon dioxide emissions rose by 0.8% in 2024 to a record 37.8 billion tonnes. The Global Carbon Project recorded fossil carbon dioxide emissions climbing to 38.1 billion tonnes in 2025.

This is the awkward truth. Clean energy is growing, but fossil energy remains deeply embedded. In many places, the new system is being layered on top of the old one rather than replacing it. The transition is real, but it is also slow and uneven. It is also expensive and highly dependent on policy, infrastructure and demand.

This is where the latest business evidence is useful, if read soberly.

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development’s Business Breakthrough Barometer shows that many executives now see the net-zero transition as an investment opportunity. Its latest survey covered more than 300 business leaders across over 50 countries, with 91% saying they had maintained or increased net-zero investments over the past year. Yet 94% also said supportive clean-energy and transition policies were critical to investment decisions.

That is a revealing signal. Business is interested, but it is also asking for the conditions to move. It wants policy certainty, cheaper infrastructure, clearer demand and better economics.

This matters in Malaysia, where the gap between sustainability language and transition capability is still wider than many would care to admit.

For several years, we have built a respectable sustainability architecture with reporting requirements, taxonomies, indices, frameworks and far more boardroom awareness than before. These are real achievements. The harder question is whether they add up to transformation.

My own years in the capital market left me with a less comfortable impression. For many listed companies, climate action still enters the boardroom mainly through the compliance door. The focus is often on ratings, materiality matrices and the next disclosure rule. Necessary though they are, these disciplines mainly force companies to confront issues they once ignored.

But here is the rub. While disclosure can show what must change, it is not the change itself.

Advocating for greater efforts is challenging. In private conversations with corporate leaders, their instinct was often not denial but caution. They simply did not see why they should move faster than regulation, investors or customers required. Climate action would remain a reporting file rather than a strategic question about energy, technology, productivity and markets.

This should not surprise us. Companies respond to incentives. Where clean energy is costly, infrastructure incomplete, demand uncertain and policy signals uneven, sustainability can become a box-ticking exercise rather than a programme of transformation. It produces reports, committees and carefully worded commitments before it produces factories, new materials, cleaner logistics, energy efficiency or bankable transition projects.

As a result, we have been slower to build the machinery of transition, where the rubber meets the road. Specifically, the country needs cheaper clean power, grid readiness, industrial upgrading, green procurement, logistics efficiency, and supply-chain capability.

This is where China offers an uncomfortable contrast.

Surely it has many contradictions. It remains a huge consumer of coal, and its political economy is not one Malaysia should copy wholesale. Yet it has treated large parts of the energy transition as an industrial project. Solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles and grid technologies are not merely climate instruments. Rather, they are manufacturing capabilities, export platforms and levers of national competitiveness.

The numbers are striking. In 2025, China installed 315 gigawatts of solar and 119 gigawatts of wind capacity, according to analysis cited by Carbon Brief. Clean energy accounted for 90% of investment in power generation, with solar alone covering half of that. Non-fossil power rose to 42% of total generation.

They are building clean industrialism, guided by the long-range goal of ecological civilisation.

I am not suggesting Malaysia should become China. But Malaysia should understand the difference between climate language and climate capability. One sits comfortably in the sustainability report. The other changes how an economy produces, moves, powers and exports.

Malaysia’s net-zero agenda has to become more honest. We should pursue net zero where it sharpens competitiveness, cuts waste, strengthens energy security, lifts productivity and builds resilience. We should also be candid about where the economics are still thin. Sustainable aviation fuel remains expensive. Green hydrogen is still costly in most markets. Low-carbon steel will require major shifts in technology, procurement and finance.

Malaysia has learned the language of sustainability. The harder task now is to build the economic muscle behind it, before others pull ahead.