TWTBACD Ch.6 - The Numbers That Meant Everything

Chapter 6

The Numbers That Meant Everything

Amsterdam, Netherlands — 1981–2019

industrialisation toll

Algorithmic trading dominates

Ch.6 opening: A banker who read the numbers and understood what they were saying

Pieter van den Berg understood the climate crisis through spreadsheets before he understood it through anything else.

He was born in 1981, in a house on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, the son of a shipping insurer who had spent his career quantifying the risks of ocean transport and who had taught his son, before anything else, that everything quantifiable deserves to be quantified and everything quantified deserves to be understood.

Pieter quantified and understood with a precision that his teachers found remarkable and his peers found, in the way that precision is sometimes found, slightly unsettling. He was not cold — that was the common misreading of people who confused precision with distance. He simply found that the numbers, understood correctly, were the most direct path to the truth, and that the truth was always worth the directness, even when it was uncomfortable.

He studied economics at the University of Amsterdam, then financial mathematics at the London School of Economics, then took a position at ABN AMRO in 2006 that was, by 2020, a senior analyst role managing a team of twelve.

The climate crisis appeared in his professional life in approximately 2011, when he was tasked with stress-testing the bank's loan portfolio against a range of climate scenarios. The scenarios were provided by a consultancy. Pieter read them, found them conservative, built his own scenarios from the primary literature, and submitted a report that concluded the bank's exposure to climate-related asset risk was substantially higher than current models suggested.

The report was well-received internally in the sense that it was read carefully by several senior people and that no one told him he was wrong. It was less well-received in the sense that the portfolio rebalancing he recommended did not happen, because the recommended rebalancing would have reduced short-term returns, and the structures that governed the bank's decision-making were not organised to prioritise a risk that would materialise in twenty years over a return that would materialise in two quarters.

Pieter continued working at the bank. He continued submitting reports. Every year, his climate exposure analysis was more alarming than the previous year's. Every year, the gap between what the analysis recommended and what the bank did narrowed very slightly, never enough, always less than the data suggested was necessary.

He had married Sofie Hendrikx in 2013. She was a radiologist — a specialist in finding what was hidden, in making the invisible visible, in reading the images that the body produced in response to diagnostic inquiry and extracting from them the truths the body was not otherwise communicating. They were, in their professional lives, doing the same thing: looking at the available evidence and saying, clearly, what it showed.

Amsterdam in 2019 was a city in active conversation with its own vulnerability: a city built, in substantial part, below sea level, dependent on a system of water management that had been engineered over centuries and that was now facing conditions it had not been designed for. The sea level at the North Sea coast had risen fourteen centimetres since 1900. The rate of rise was accelerating. The Dutch engineering establishment had, with characteristic precision, quantified the accelerating risk and was managing it — with supplementary defences, with updated flood modelling, with an upgrade programme for the water management infrastructure.

But Pieter, reading the numbers, knew that management was not the same as solution, that the gap between what was happening to the climate and what the infrastructure was designed to handle was widening, and that the widening was a function of decisions made not in Amsterdam but in every city and country and factory and power plant on the planet.

He and Sofie had not had children. This was a decision — or rather, a deferral that had become, without formal declaration, a decision — that Pieter understood as a function of the same calculation he applied to his climate portfolios: optimal timing mattered. The world in 2019 was not yet the world he wanted to bring a child into. The world in 2021 or 2022, he thought — with vaccines, with greater stability, with the sense that the acute crisis was behind them — might be different.

He could not have known that the crisis he was waiting to be behind them was just beginning.

climate risk

Ch.6 close: A man who read the numbers and was waiting for the world to catch up