Beyond the Doomsday Scenario

The trouble with the climate debate is that it often sells the worst case as the baseline case. That is broadly what happened with RCP8.5, a high-end emissions scenario developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a stress-test for policy. Gradually, this doom-and-gloom scenario escaped that context and entered public debate as though it were the default future.

Scenarios are tools for thinking about risk, built around assumptions about population, energy use, technology and policy. Their value lies not in predicting the future but in helping governments and businesses navigate a range of plausible ones.

When scientists recently moved away from RCP8.5 as the default storyline, critics pounced. For some, including the 47th US President, it became proof that climate warnings had always been exaggerated. 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 public discussion of climate risk has leaned on the most frightening version of the future. Catastrophe became the dominant frame. That approach is now a weaker basis on which to carry the argument, especially with businesses that must make decisions under genuine economic constraints.

The case for climate action now has to stand on harder ground rooted in energy security, industrial capability, productivity and resilience. Net zero cannot keep all its eggs in the basket of the most alarming scenario. What matters now is the kind of economy 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, compared with USD1.1 trillion going into oil, gas and coal.

Even so, 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, and the Global Carbon Project recorded them climbing further to 38.1 billion tonnes in 2025.

The awkward truth is that renewable energy is growing while fossil energy remains deeply embedded. The transition is under way, but it is still slow, uneven, expensive and highly dependent on regulation, infrastructure and demand.

Here, 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 shift to net zero as an investment opportunity. Its latest survey of more than 300 business leaders across 50 countries found that 91% had maintained or increased net-zero investments over the past year, yet 94% said supportive clean energy policies were critical to their investment decisions.

The survey suggests that business interest is real, but so is its dependence on enabling conditions. Companies want policy certainty, cheaper infrastructure, clearer demand and better returns.

In Malaysia, the gap between sustainability ambition and transition capability is still wider than many would care to admit. Over the past several years, we have built a credible framework of reporting requirements, taxonomies and governance standards.

My own time in the capital market, however, left a less reassuring impression. For many companies, climate action still arrives chiefly through the routine of compliance, in the form of the next disclosure rule, the next materiality matrix and the next ratings cycle. Disclosure can clarify what needs to change, but it cannot by itself bring about the change.

None of this is surprising. Companies respond to the economics in front of them. Where low-carbon energy remains costly, infrastructure is incomplete, demand is uncertain and regulatory signals are uneven, sustainability can slip into a box-ticking exercise. Reports and carefully worded commitments are easier to produce than the greener factories, logistics improvements, efficiency gains and bankable transition projects that meaningful change requires.

China, for all its contradictions, offers an uncomfortable contrast. The country is a huge consumer of coal, and its political economy is not one Malaysia should copy. At the same time, it has treated large parts of the energy transition as an industrial project. In China, solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles and grid technologies are treated as manufacturing capabilities, export platforms and levers of national competitiveness, not only as climate instruments.

In 2025, China installed 315 gigawatts of solar and 119 gigawatts of wind, according to Carbon Brief. Clean energy accounted for 90% of power sector investment, and non-fossil power rose to 42% of total generation. Taken together, it amounts to clean industrialism, underpinned by what China calls ecological civilisation.

The point is not that Malaysia should follow China’s model wholesale, but that we should understand the difference between climate language and climate capability. The first fits neatly into reporting. The second reshapes 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 and builds energy resilience, and be candid about where the business case is still thin. Sustainable aviation fuel is still expensive, green hydrogen is still costly in most markets, and low-carbon steel depends on major shifts in technology and finance.

A country can master the vocabulary of transition and still miss the transition. Malaysia is well ahead on the vocabulary. The economics of transition, with its hard choices in energy, industry and supply chains, remains the unfinished business of this decade, regardless of the scenario Malaysia chooses to invoke.