DENVER - Language, "a little bit of the truth," and accountability are key to getting the U.S. in particular to view climate change as a human responsibility instead of a political issue, environmental lawyer Christopher Fisher said during this week's ConnectX event in Denver.

Fisher, who serves as chairman of his firm’s Telecommunications Practice, noted it's important to recognize that "[climate change] can be politicized" because economies and businesses will need to shift away from fossil fuels. Those moves are necessary even if they make fossil fuel giants and those who profit from exploiting non-renewable resources uncomfortable.

"For whatever reason — climate change — those two words are political," he said, explaining that he traced the genesis of this back to 1991 when Shell Oil produced a documentary titled Climate of Concern. "Shell Oil!" he confirmed to the audience quietly laughing at the irony.

Back then, as the scientific community began talking about the risks of climate change, everyone understood there was going to be disruption in industries. "There's going to be change. We'll have to do this. But we've got to do this because there's a human factor and a global factor," Fisher said, describing a common point of view at the time.

Then "for whatever reason, especially in the U.S., somebody figured out that was gonna be really disruptive to the economic times. We weren't prepared to go off fossil fuels, and some of these technologies really weren't quite ready. Conversations split really [quickly]" into activists and deniers as a response, he explained.

For meaningful global climate action to take place, "there will be winners and losers," Fisher said. This means while the politicalization of climate change is unfortunate in its divisiveness, it's not unfounded in its logic.

Reaching net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions requires transitioning away from fossil fuels toward renewable energy sources. Because fossil fuel companies haven't done much to change the way they do business, a net-zero future probably won't be very profitable for them.

While the latest IPCC report made it clear the global community is well past reversing the impacts of climate change, remaining possible options are adaptation and mitigation, Fisher explained.

For many businesses, integrating climate change-focused thinking into operations and processes is a new arena.

"We're trying to encourage people to take that first step," Mark Christenson, president of mobile infrastructure consultancy firm MD7, said during the ConnectX panel. "If I were to spend too much time thinking about the goals globally that we all want to achieve by 2030, 2050, etc., it becomes paralyzing."

Christenson recommends that his clients think about the simple things first, like reducing the amount of paper used in offices. "That's a small thing. But if you do a small thing and you can get adoption, then you're taking a step, and you're starting to build that into your culture," he explained. "What we're trying to do is get the flywheel turning so that this becomes something that you think about as second nature."

Posing climate action as increasing efficiencies is more attractive to leaders and investors who may not be persuaded by the human responsibility angle.

While reducing paper use does contribute to mitigating climate change, it also works at eliminating waste, which is a much less political angle on the same action, Christenson explained. "Virtually every business wants to eliminate waste — wasted time, wasted money, [and] wasted resources" he said.

"When was the best time to plant a tree? 20 years ago. When was the second best time? Today," Christenson said. "I wish we started learning this in the nineties, but better 2022 than three more years or five years" from now, he said.