Zero: The Climate Race

The Middle East conflict is now in its fifth month, deepening the oil and gas supply shock. Early in the war, analysts worried that the oil price would rise to $200 a barrel, causing a global recession and widespread panic, but that didn’t happen. This week on Zero, Akshat Rathi is joined by Bloomberg Opinion columnist Javier Blas to discuss why oil prices stayed around $100 per barrel and why the war is the start of a new pa...

How should we navigate a world in which anxieties about AI, climate change and capitalism collide? This week on Zero, Akshat Rathi speaks with Helen Phillips, author of Hum and the second-ever winner of the Climate Fiction Prize. Rathi asks Phillips how she’s transformed her anxieties into captivating prose, how her relationship to technology has changed through writing and what humanity loses out on if we rely on AI too much...

On a windswept cliff at the edge of Tasmania, scientists are quietly tracking the future of our planet. This week, host Rebecca Jones speaks with David Stringer, managing editor of climate and ESG news in Asia, about Kennaook/Cape Grim — home to some of the cleanest air on Earth and one of the world’s most important climate monitoring stations.

Learn how decades of data are reshaping our understanding of climate change,...

Andy Burnham has become the UK’s sixth prime minister in just 10 years. When it comes to energy and climate, Labour Party’s Burnham will inherit many of the same challenges of his predecessors: high energy prices, security of supply and an increasingly polarized debate over the UK’s ambitions to reach net zero. This week on Zero, Akshat Rathi sits down with Dale Vince, founder of Ecotricity and major donor to Labo...

Hundreds of millions of people around the world have no access to reliable electricity, a problem that doesn’t seem to be going away. Since US President Donald Trump started his second term, Western countries have cut development funding, including for climate projects. This week on Zero, Bloomberg’s Akshat Rathi asks Philippe Valahu, chief executive officer of Private Infrastructure Development Group, why it is still s...

The great famine of the 1870s killed 50 million people – and El Niño was a key driver. Another El Niño phase has just begun and it’s expected to be among the strongest. There are five times as many people in 2026 as there were in the 1870s and the planet is 1.4C hotter. So are we better prepared? Bloomberg’s Akshat Rathi speaks with Mingfang Ting, professor of climate at Columbia University, about the natural phen...

From hydration breaks at this year’s FIFA World Cup to the Tokyo Olympics moving its marathon 1,000km northward, climate change is affecting sport. And sport is affecting climate, as events grow in size and carbon emissions. To talk about the future of sport on an overheating planet, this week on Zero, Akshat Rathi is joined by Jessica Murfree, professor at the University of North Carolina, who studies the intersection of spo...

The common narrative is that the US renewables industry is struggling. But that’s not the case for the whole sector. This week on Zero, Akshat Rathi talks with Kevin Smith, chief executive officer of Cypress Creek Energy, which recently secured $3.5 billion in financing to build one of the biggest solar and battery projects in the US. Even as the current American administration dismantles clean-energy policies, Smith sees a b...

The key to tackling climate change is moving away from burning fossil fuels to using renewable energy. But in his book More and More and More, French historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz argues that the world has never actually managed a successful energy transition before and current plans are unrealistic. Many have taken his writing to mean that stopping global warming is impossible, however, he tells Akshat Rathi this week on Zero, h...

Ben & Jerry’s isn’t just known for ice cream, but also its support for social causes. With over $1 billion in sales last year, it’s an asset for its owner Magnum. So why has one of its founders quit, and the other launched a campaign to make Ben & Jerry's independent? Bloomberg’s Akshat Rathi sits down with co-founder Ben Cohen to ask about the Free Ben & Jerry’s campaign, why businesses sh...

It's been more than three months since the US attacked Iran, leading to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz that carries 20% of the world's oil and gas. The shock to energy markets has been so intense that some countries are taking longer-term measures to cope. This week on Zero, Akshat Rathi and Peter Guest explore the history of policy responses to energy shocks and what’s different in the 2020s.

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At COP28 in December 2023, the world committed to transitioning away from fossil fuels. Yet in the years since, there’s been little progress. A meeting in Colombia last month hoped to change that, gathering ministers and climate envoys from 57 countries to try and chart a path to end the use of fossil fuels. This week on Zero, Tzeporah Berman, chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, tells Akshat Rathi wh...

Reform UK is currently the most popular party in Britain. If voted into government, it wants to end all subsidies for renewable energy, ban battery energy storage, end net-zero targets, drill for more oil and gas in the North Sea and encourage fracking on British soil.

This week on Zero, Akshat Rathi asks Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice about the party’s climate and energy plans, and why he calls it “net stupi...

With wars raging and supply chains blocked, we’re in an era of geopolitical chaos. This week on Zero, Akshat Rathi talks with Gerald Butts, chairman of the political risk consultancy Eurasia Group and former chief of staff to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. They discuss how investors and companies are responding to the energy shock, where the green transition might falter and who will emerge winners a decade from now. 

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Everywhere you look, you see two types of technology existing side-by-side. One that runs on fossil fuels and one that runs on clean electricity. There’s an ongoing struggle between the two, a tug of war between two very different futures. Some call it the mid-transition, and it comes with costs that make it politically fraught. This week on Zero, Emily Grubert, professor of sustainable energy policy at the University of Notr...

We are living in an increasingly divided world. It took two decades to get to the Paris Agreement, and then global cooperation really lasted only for a decade. One key reason for this fragmentation is US President Donald Trump, who has taken an axe to the rules-based international order that America helped build. This week on Zero, Gordon LaForge, senior policy analyst at think tank New America, tells Akshat Rathi what comes next, ...

Sadiq Khan is about to complete 10 years as London’s mayor. He’s seen the city affected by Brexit, the pandemic and two energy crises. That hasn’t deterred him from deploying some of the strongest air-quality regulations in any city. But he hasn’t yet succeeded in getting enough homes built and struggled to keep improving the train network. As cities keep growing, Khan talks to Akshat Rathi about lessons fro...

In the past month, we've seen two major plans from two of the world's biggest polluters. In March, China approved its 15th five-year plan, which gave us a clearer sense of how the government makes progress on its climate goals. A few weeks after that, India published its climate plan for 2035. This week on Zero, Bloomberg Green’s Lili Pike and Akshat Rathi discuss those climate plans, and whether they’re ambitious enoug...

Since the US and Israel launched their attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global energy markets have been frenetic, prices swinging up and down with each new headline. Even with the prospect of the Strait of Hormuz reopening, prices of oil and gas have risen around the world, and we’re starting to see impacts on local economies, particularly in Asia. This week on Zero, Bloomberg opinion columnist David Fickling explains what those i...