The fight against climate change will never give us the euphoria of a moon landing, says Peter L. Abowd.
In July 1969, people worldwide crowded around television screens to watch the Apollo 11 landing. It was a tangible moment of human triumph. Climate action will never yield that, Peter says. “We succeed by preventing something from happening. And that makes it much harder to celebrate.”
That is the space he works in now as Temasek’s Assistant Vice President, Sustainable Solutions, tasked with helping the Singapore-headquartered investor’s portfolio companies find workable paths to Net Zero – progress measured in avoided outcomes, in emissions that never enter the atmosphere.
It is a constant work in progress, but he stays the course because he believes he is in the right place to make a difference. His conviction aligns with Temasek’s purpose: catalysing solutions to climate challenges by bringing together expertise and capital. “If I didn’t think I could do that here, I wouldn’t be here. That’s my mission. That’s my mandate.”
From chemistry to carbon
An American by birth, Peter’s fascination with energy began in his New Jersey high school.
He remembers his chemistry teacher dropping a piece of metal into water and watching it explode. “To me it was real-world magic,” he says. “She would take two clear fluids, put them together, and boom, it was bright purple or yellow. And I thought, wow, I could get to do magic for a living.”
When he later attended the University of Notre Dame, his professor sketched a thumbnail-sized square on a map of Arizona and explained that covering it with solar panels could power the entire US. Looking back, “it was a major oversimplification,” Peter says, “but also a crystallising message. Why wouldn’t we do that?”
That thought carried him through a PhD programme at the renowned University of California, Berkeley, a postdoctoral stint in Singapore, and five years with the US Department of Energy. He watched solar startups rise and fall, and investors burn their fingers on premature bets. Through it, one conviction held: clean technologies won’t win on carbon taxes or environmental guilt. They win when they are the most economical solution to deploy. “When that happens, there’s no fight anymore. They just win.”
That pragmatism underpins his work at Temasek. As part of a five-person Sustainability Solutions team, he helps portfolio companies assess which decarbonisation technologies are ready to adopt, and at what cost.
Having spent years in the lab, he knows development takes time. “For a solar module, if you need a thousand-hour accelerated reliability test, you simply can’t do that in less than a thousand hours.”
Yet, even as engineering demands patience, investors want speed. Hence, Peter keeps the conversation anchored in what technology can actually deliver, and when. What gives those conversations weight is Temasek’s long-term ambition of reducing net carbon emissions attributable to its portfolio to net zero by 2050.
For power assets that can’t be simply switched off or readily replaced by renewables, the questions turn specific: retrofit for carbon capture or switch fuels? “Divesting fossil fuel assets may be the most straightforward way to get emissions off the balance sheet, but that doesn’t solve the problem,” he says. “We want actual real-world decarbonisation.”
The harder truth is that many technologies aren’t yet at the point where companies can use them – climate technologies that sit in the “valley of death”, too late for seed money, but too early for billion-dollar infrastructure funds. This is where Temasek is making a difference, helping promising technologies scale. Many investors avoid that stretch, he says, but proving technologies in this space matters. “If we can prove decarbonisation works and makes money, others will [follow]. Business follows business. All this snowballs. The regional context makes the work both harder and more urgent.
Southeast Asia is home to the world’s youngest coal fleet. Average plant age is less than 15 years, and they are designed to last many decades. Left to run, Peter says, those plants could lock in the region’s emissions for decades to come. “If we don’t solve the issue of decarbonisation in Southeast Asia, the whole world will still burn.”
Singapore, he says, offers rare leverage: stability, capital and long planning horizons. Here, people can plan in decades.”
A future worth protecting
Away from the office, Peter does not switch off.
Diving in the region’s seas, he has seen coral reefs bleach between visits – places full of colour now bare. “I won’t pretend that I’m on the front lines of seeing climate change,” he says. “But when you see that, it keeps you motivated.”
At street level, the reminders are lighter. “Every time we pass a solar panel, my wife says, ‘Oh, look, there’s a solar panel. Doesn’t that make you happy?’” he laughs, admitting it does.
But he is realistic about what one lifetime can deliver. “I’ll spend my entire career on this, and when I retire, if we are part way towards the goal of averting the worst effects of climate change globally, I will have massively succeeded.”
The aim, he says, is not a single moment of celebration but a world defined by what never came to pass. The same ethic underlies Temasek’s sustainability mission, which scales its commitments with future generations in mind. For Peter, it comes down to something more personal.
I’m going to have kids one day… this is their future, and it’s my job to help protect [it].
Peter L. Abowd
Driving Decarbonisation
Temasek’s Sustainable Solutions team identifies, invests in, and deploys innovative solutions that drive decarbonisation and other sustainability outcomes across Temasek and its portfolio companies.
